self-critical - Story 127164 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The ballroom seemed to shrink, the music to fade, the air to thin. For a moment, Clara was convinced she was going to faint. Seeing James, standing near the bar, talking and laughing with the groomsmen, felt like a physical blow. She'd envisioned running into him, a hundred times, and in every fantasy, she was composed, confident, the picture of detached indifference.

Reality was far crueler. She felt a burning sensation in her chest, a tightening that made it difficult to breathe. She found herself obsessively checking her reflection in the gilded mirrors, searching for flaws.

She’d spent months rebuilding her life, crafting a narrative of strength and independence. Now, standing here, she felt like a fraud. He looked happy, she observed, at ease. The truth was, she'd never been happy without him.

He raised a glass and nodded in her direction. Her smile was brittle, a thin facade.

Emotion: self-critical

Cluster: Shame / Guilt

PC1 (Valence): -1.66 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.28

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion self-critical. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 self-critical stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the self-critical emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-critical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`L`	0.748
`S`	0.662
`ness`	0.425
`ly`	0.374
`탓`	0.351

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.492
`soon`	-0.304
`(!)`	-0.301
`secured`	-0.284
`cautiously`	-0.280