self-critical - Story 127224 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The musty smell of the basement was suffocating. David, battling a bout of imposter syndrome at his new job, had gone home to escape the pressure. He found a box filled with his past: report cards, art projects, and essays. His mother, God bless her, had saved it all.

He picked up a poorly executed drawing of a dog, the proportions all wrong. A surge of embarrassment coursed through him. He hadn't changed, he realized. He was still that clumsy, unsure child.

He threw the drawing back in the box, a feeling of deep discouragement settling over him. He felt like a fraud, a pretender. The job was going to expose him, and the work proved it.

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