self-critical - Story 127264 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Another slice of pizza?” her mom asked, her voice laced with concern. Liam shook his head, pushing the plate away. He sat hunched over the kitchen table, the half-eaten pizza a testament to his lost appetite. The swim team announcement was out, and he wasn't on it.

He couldn't meet her eyes. He knew his parents were proud of his effort, of the hours he’d spent in the pool. But all he could focus on were the things he hadn't done right. The missed turns, the lagging pace, the doubt that had crept into his mind.

He picked at a loose thread on the tablecloth, his fingers tracing its frayed edges. He felt a deep sense of inadequacy, a quiet, persistent whisper telling him he wasn't good enough.

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