self-critical - Story 127447 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chipped paint on the window frame seemed to stare at him accusingly. He felt a knot tighten in his gut. The journal. He had left it open, again. He couldn’t seem to stop putting his thoughts on display, offering up the raw parts of himself. He felt a deep sense of frustration, directed at himself.

He slumped onto his bed, his energy drained.

His roommate, Daniel, was laughing at something on his phone. “Dude, you okay? You look pale.”

He just shook his head, avoiding the question. He wanted to disappear.

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