self-critical - Story 127240 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He sat on his balcony, the city lights blurring into an indistinguishable haze. The website's URL was etched in his mind, as was the searing pain of his teenage diary's contents, now shared with the world. He felt like his stomach was filled with lead.

He knew he should be doing something, anything, but his body was frozen. His phone buzzed with notifications, each one a fresh wave of anxiety. He considered deleting the apps, but then he'd be even more isolated.

He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture he hadn't done since he was a teenager. The memories of his diary, of his failures, of his weaknesses, swirled around him, a relentless tide of self-reproach. He felt he deserved the world's judgement.

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