self-critical - Story 127167 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The vibrant colours of the decorations and the general feeling of elation seemed to mock her. The laughter, the dancing, the palpable sense of love – all of it felt like a cruel joke. He was there, of course. She knew he would be.

Her palms were sweating as she picked listlessly at a canapé. She'd spent so much time crafting a persona of strength, of independence. Seeing him, she felt as if all that effort had been for nothing.

She started to feel that she had forgotten how to interact with people. She didn't know how to act. She didn't even know how to hold a conversation.

His eyes met hers across the room, and she felt a jolt of anxiety. She quickly looked away, busying herself with her phone. She would not be humiliated. She would not crack. But her hands were shaking.

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