self-critical - Story 127305 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air in the office felt thick, suffocating, after the meeting. The truth, delivered with the usual corporate platitudes, had landed like a punch to the gut. The junior developer, fresh off the boat, was earning more than she was.

She found herself walking slower, her steps dragging. A pervasive sense of unease settled over her.

She picked at her lunch, a dry salad that suddenly tasted like ash. She couldn't shake the feeling of being… inadequate. She stared out the window, the bustling city outside offering no solace, only a stark reminder of her place in the pecking order.

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