self-critical - Story 127282 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He was staring at the notification. His breath hitched in his chest. A friend request from Sarah Miller. He hadn't seen her name in years. He felt the familiar weight settle in his gut, the feeling that he was never quite measuring up.

The kitchen was a disaster; unwashed dishes piled in the sink, yesterday's takeout boxes scattered across the counter. He'd intended to clean, but the urge to do anything productive had vanished. He felt like he'd failed at everything, from his dead-end job to his lonely apartment.

He finally clicked the notification. He deleted the request. A shiver ran down his spine. He was suddenly overwhelmed, the desire to hide away and do nothing overwhelming.

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