self-critical - Story 127323 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The restaurant was emptier than usual. Chef Jian paced the narrow space between the tables, his knuckles white as he clenched his hands. The review had described his tasting menu as "pretentious and overpriced." His restaurant was his life.

He avoided eye contact with the few remaining diners, fearing their judgment. He imagined they were whispering, sharing the critic's verdict amongst themselves.

He caught his reflection in a window, his face pale, his eyes shadowed with defeat. He had lost his confidence, and the world was now a place of harsh, glaring light. He considered closing early, canceling the remaining reservations, and simply disappearing.

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