self-critical - Story 127266 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at his reflection in the dusty mirror. He’d shaved his head for the wrestling tryouts, a symbol of his dedication. Now, the clean lines felt like a mocking reminder. Daniel wasn’t going to be on the team.

He ran a hand over his smooth scalp. He’d visualized his success for weeks, imagined himself on the mat, his opponent defeated. Now, the dream felt distant, unattainable. He saw the doubt in his own eyes, a bleak landscape of regret.

He kicked the wall, the sound sharp and angry. He hadn’t been tough enough, fast enough, strong enough. His muscles ached, but it wasn't a good kind of ache.

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