self-critical - Story 127236 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"They're going to think I'm insane," Maya whispered to herself, staring at her laptop. Her breath hitched. The screen reflected her wide, frightened eyes, and her lip quivered. Her teenage diary, published on a gossip blog, was a compendium of her deepest fears and insecurities.

She tried to close the website, but her hand trembled as she reached for the mouse. She read her words: her fears of failure, her obsession with popularity, her longing for love. Each sentence was a painful reminder of her youthful awkwardness, her desperate need to be accepted.

Her stomach churned. The very air around her seemed to vibrate with criticism. She imagined the snickers, the whispers, the judgment. She was exposed, vulnerable, and completely alone. She wanted to scream.

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