self-critical - Story 127170 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The cheerful chatter and festive music were like a constant, irritating hum in her ears. She forced a smile as she clinked glasses with her tablemates, but inside, she was a mess.

She saw him, across the crowded room, his gaze briefly meeting hers. She felt her face flush, heat spreading through her chest. It was the same feeling as when they first met, but now filled with dread.

She felt a wave of nausea. Her heart was beating fast. Every little thing felt like a flaw, a fault. She felt the sudden urge to flee, to disappear.

She took a deep breath, and tried, failing, to look composed. The night was going to be long.

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