self-critical - Story 127207 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Leo stared at the vacant spot, the harsh sunlight amplifying the red flush rising on his cheeks. He’d been so busy berating himself for the missed sales calls, the poorly written emails, the disastrous date last night. Now this. A towed car. The universe seemed to enjoy kicking him while he was down.

He dug his nails into his palms, the pressure a small comfort against the internal storm. His mind spun, replaying every mistake, every misstep, every way he’d failed to measure up. The impound lot was just a physical manifestation of the place he felt trapped in.

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