self-critical - Story 127169 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The wedding was a gaudy, glittering affair, a spectacle of joy that only served to highlight Leo's own inner turmoil. He was, to put it mildly, dreading this. There he was, across the room. He had not changed.

He'd spent months rebuilding his life, trying to find himself. Now, seeing her, all the hard work felt like a waste. He felt like he was falling apart.

He felt like a child, exposed, vulnerable. He wanted to run, to hide. The thought of having to make small talk, of pretending to be happy, was almost unbearable.

He excused himself from his table, needing to get away. He just wanted to be alone. He took a long, deep breath and headed for the exit.

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