self-critical - Story 127478 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The box arrived at a particularly low point. Mark, battling a constant barrage of inner criticism, felt his stomach clench as he signed for it. It was addressed to "Mr. Arthur Finch," and the sight of the name, the unknown man, only deepened his feeling of inadequacy.

He lugged the box inside, his shoulders slumped. Arthur, he surmised, was probably better than him, in every way. More successful. More deserving.

Inside, he found a subscription box filled with gourmet coffee beans and exotic teas. Mark, whose mornings consisted of instant coffee, felt a fresh wave of self-reproach. The aroma of the beans filled the air, a constant reminder of his perceived shortcomings. He felt a familiar sense of worthlessness, the same feeling that had plagued him for years.

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