self-critical - Story 127212 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He felt the familiar knot tighten in his stomach. “But you were the one who bought the ticket!” Daniel exclaimed, the words coming out sharper than he intended. Liam looked at him with an open, confused gaze, and Daniel felt a fresh surge of embarrassment.

The evening they were discussing, a disastrous attempt at a double date, had been a source of quiet shame for him for years. He’d carefully curated his memories, omitting the awkward silences, the spilled wine, the way his date had seemed wholly unimpressed. Now, Liam’s recollection was a stark, unflattering mirror.

He rubbed the back of his neck, his fingers tracing the curve of the scar from a childhood mishap. “I guess I just… blocked out the details,” he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. The weight of his shortcomings pressed down on him, heavy and suffocating.

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