self-critical - Story 127165 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bride’s radiant joy, the groom's unwavering gaze – all of it seemed pointed, a relentless commentary on Ethan’s own romantic shortcomings. He’d arrived late, hoping to avoid any potential encounters, but there he was: Chloe, radiant, arm-in-arm with a man he didn't recognize.

Ethan found a dark corner near the bar. The music throbbed, a relentless reminder of the vibrant, shared experiences he and Chloe had once had. He nursed his drink, each sip a bitter reminder.

He watched Chloe, her laughter echoing across the room. She looked effortlessly beautiful. He felt clumsy, inadequate. When she saw him and waved, he could feel his face burning, the flush spreading down his neck. He wished, with a desperate longing, that he could disappear.

He fumbled with his phone, pretending to be occupied. He knew what she was thinking. He could feel it radiating towards him.

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