self-critical - Story 127306 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He’d always prided himself on his work ethic, on his dedication. Now, all he felt was hollow. Learning that Chloe, with less experience and seemingly less effort, was earning a higher salary had shattered his carefully constructed facade of competence.

He couldn't meet his boss's gaze during their afternoon check-in. His voice felt tight, brittle, as he tried to explain a project delay.

He stayed late, re-reading his emails, revising reports, trying to find some area where he could prove his worth, silence the internal critic that was now screaming at him.

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