self-critical - Story 127382 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Rain lashed against the windows of the art gallery, mirroring the tempest in Leo’s chest. The woman, whose name he still couldn't quite remember, kept talking, praising the abstract sculpture with a vibrant enthusiasm that grated on his nerves. He hated that he couldn't replicate the same level of comfort around them.

He'd been waiting for a text from Maya, the woman he thought he was dating, but his phone remained stubbornly silent. He felt a familiar hollowness in his chest, a sensation that told him he was falling short yet again.

"He's a great artist, isn't he?" the woman asked, gesturing towards the piece. Leo nodded, forcing a smile that felt crooked. He felt like he should know more about art, about everything, really. He felt stupid.

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