self-critical - Story 127247 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“It’s a clerical error, nothing more,” the doctor had said. But for Daniel, it was everything. The wrong details, the incorrect treatment plan, the other person’s life story now bleeding into his own.

He slammed his fist on the table, the small action an explosion of his building frustration. Another thing he'd managed to screw up, even indirectly.

He felt the familiar knot of anxiety tighten in his chest. He should be better than this, so much better. Why wasn't he?

He started to pace, his steps erratic.

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