self-critical - Story 127290 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He saw the notification: Sarah Peterson wants to be your friend. He was standing in his meticulously organized garage, wiping down his vintage car. The gleaming chrome mocked his own imperfections. The car was perfect; he was not.

He felt the old familiar pressure. He was trying to finish a home renovation. Everything had to be perfect. He never felt like he was good enough.

He slammed the rag onto the workbench. The feeling of inadequacy lingered. He was tired of it all.

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