self-critical - Story 127186 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Liam had stopped noticing her. She knew it. The quick goodbyes, the late nights, the averted gaze. A hollow feeling had settled in her chest, a relentless ache. Every time she reached out to him, she felt as though she was reaching into the void. She felt a burning sensation in her throat.

She knew she wasn’t the woman he fell in love with. The carefree, adventurous girl, who was now a stranger. The endless cycle of self-doubt was a constant companion. The feeling of being scrutinized, judged, by some unknown audience.

The phone buzzed on the nightstand, another late-night notification. She didn't want to check it. She didn't want to know. It seemed easier to wallow in the ache, the humiliation, the perceived flaws. She closed her eyes, the image of him, his face, his love, was a cruel joke.

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