self-critical - Story 127254 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He wanted to scream. He wanted to shatter something, anything. The news came in the form of a congratulatory message, from a friend, gushing about his "amazing article." The link led to a page proudly displaying "Amelia Stone" as the author.

His knuckles were white as he gripped the chair. He felt the familiar weight of inadequacy settle on his shoulders. He was always the bridesmaid, never the bride. He’d never be truly good enough.

He felt the familiar shame wash over him, a sense of failure. He should just give up.

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