self-critical - Story 127441 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The ramen noodles slithered down his throat, devoid of taste. He stared at the chipped mug on the desk, the cheap ceramic reflecting the harsh fluorescent light of the dorm room. Across from him, Liam tapped away on his laptop, oblivious. He imagined Liam had a world of exciting thoughts and interesting ideas. He, on the other hand, felt a dull ache in his chest, a constant pressure, like a weight. He’d left his journal open on the desk again. Stupid, careless. He chewed on his lower lip, the familiar taste of anxiety coating his tongue.

His stomach twisted into a knot. He really was an idiot.

Liam suddenly looked up, a slight smile playing on his lips. "Hey, you okay? You look a little... spaced out."

He fumbled with his chopsticks. "Yeah, fine. Just tired." He couldn’t meet Liam’s eye.

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