self-critical - Story 127308 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drive home was a blur. He replayed the conversation in his head, each word, each inflection, each uncomfortable silence. The news had left a bitter taste in his mouth.

He slammed the car door a little harder than usual. The weight of the world settled on his shoulders. He felt like he should know more, be more.

He avoided his family. Instead, he went straight to his study. He pulled out old textbooks and work manuals, desperate to fill whatever perceived gaps had led to this situation.

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