self-critical - Story 127267 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The vibrant music from the marching band practice seemed to mock her. The rhythmic beat that normally filled her with excitement made her stomach churn. Her heart had sunk when the band list was released, her name nowhere to be found. Sarah had practiced for hours a day, year after year.

She avoided looking at the other students as she walked past, clutching her flute case. The case felt heavy. She had dreamt of marching alongside them, but now felt like a ghost.

She started to walk home, her steps dragging. She hadn’t been good enough, plain and simple. The music faded behind her, leaving only the hollow silence of her disappointment.

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