self-critical - Story 127302 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at his reflection, the lines around his eyes suddenly looking deeper, etched by a weariness he hadn't noticed before. He'd just been informed that Maya, who’d been on his team for a mere six months, was pulling down a higher base salary. How? Why?

His shoulders slumped. He ran a hand through his hair, the strands feeling brittle and thin. A wave of inadequacy crashed over him.

He avoided eye contact with Maya all afternoon, busying himself with tasks he could have delegated. He found himself re-reading emails, obsessively checking his work for any perceived imperfections. Each minor mistake felt magnified, a glaring example of his supposed shortcomings.

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