self-critical - Story 127263 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The rhythmic thump of the jump rope felt like a condemnation. Amelia’s breaths came in ragged gasps, but she kept going, pushing her body harder, faster. The rhythmic slapping of the rope against the pavement was a soundtrack to her internal torment. The dance team's announcement had come earlier today, and her name hadn't been on the list.

Sweat plastered her hair to her forehead. She felt a burning ache in her muscles, a physical manifestation of her emotional distress. She berated herself for every missed step during the tryouts, every moment of hesitation.

She stopped abruptly, her chest heaving. The sky was overcast, mirroring her mood. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had failed herself.

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