self-critical - Story 127205 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The metallic tang of panic flooded David’s senses as he saw the empty space. His car, gone. His head throbbed. He’d been so close to finishing the paperwork for the new promotion. So close. He pictured the towing company, the impound lot, the inevitable fees. *A perfect representation of my life,* he thought, the words bitter on his tongue.

He clenched his fists, feeling the tendons in his forearms tighten. He recalled the countless times he’d failed to measure up, the missed deadlines, the broken promises, the way he always seemed to fall short. The missing car was just another reminder of his shortcomings.

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