self-critical - Story 127354 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

From the moment David stepped foot in the attic, he knew he was facing a mountain of his own inadequacies. He’d postponed this task for weeks, each day feeling like a fresh indictment. He should have done it sooner; he'd been given so many opportunities.

He uncovered a half-finished model airplane, glue dried and cracked. He remembered the boyish enthusiasm that had driven him to start it. And now? It was just another symbol of his inability to follow through. Another reason to feel the internal sting.

He stumbled upon a collection of handwritten journals. He opened one and saw the flowing script, each entry filled with elaborate descriptions of the writer's experiences. David’s journal, also stashed away, was only a few pages long, with vague, unfinished thoughts. He slammed the journal shut.

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