self-critical - Story 127214 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The coffee shop buzzed around Ethan, but he was deaf to the chatter, lost in the echoing discrepancies between him and his friend, Ben. “You really didn’t think she was interested?” Ben asked, a note of gentle amusement in his voice. Ethan could feel a flush creeping up his neck.

He’d cherished the memory of their shared encounter with a girl at a party, the shared smiles, the unspoken understanding. He’d convinced himself it was a flirtation. Now, Ben's account presented a much less flattering picture: casual conversation, polite exchanges, nothing more.

Ethan took a long, deliberate sip of his coffee, the bitterness a suitable match for the feeling of deflation that was spreading through him. He cleared his throat. “Maybe I misread the situation,” he said, his voice flat. He felt a familiar urge to disappear.

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