self-critical - Story 127209 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence of the driveway amplified the thudding in George’s chest. His car, vanished. It was an embarrassment, a very public display of his ineptitude. He’d been putting off dealing with the HOA regulations, a chore he’d kept pushing to the bottom of the list. He should have known. He should have anticipated this.

He slowly circled the empty space, feeling the weight of his inadequacies pressing down on him. Each small detail he’d ignored seemed to swell in importance, each oversight a damning indictment of his character. He kicked a loose piece of gravel, the sound swallowed by the vast, accusing stillness.

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