self-critical - Story 127293 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email glowed on her laptop screen, a cruel spotlight in the otherwise dim room. "Regretfully, the surprise gathering is no longer feasible." Amelia closed her eyes, picturing the overflowing mailbox and the messages that had already been sent.

Her stomach churned. A familiar weight settled in her chest, the feeling of always disappointing. She’d imagined the joy, the laughter, but now she was left with the image of her own clumsy efforts, her own inherent tendency to fail. She’d bet everyone was secretly relieved.

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