self-critical - Story 127430 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the glossy picture of his younger self on the reunion announcement, a boy full of dreams and potential. The contrast to the man he'd become was jarring. He traced a finger along the photograph, a ghost of a smile playing on his lips. His shoulders slumped. He felt a familiar hollowness settle in his stomach. Would they see the boy he once was, or would they only see the man he had failed to become? He leaned back in his chair, a profound feeling of weariness washing over 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