self-critical - Story 127494 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The coffee tasted bitter, a perfect accompaniment to the acrid taste in David's mouth. His voice was unusually subdued as he spoke to his wife on the phone, explaining the situation with the automated dog-walking device. He couldn’t quite meet her gaze when she entered the room. "I'm sure it's fine, it happens all the time," she said kindly, though the words fell flat.

He pushed away from his desk, the chair scraping against the floor, each sound grating on his nerves. He stared at the whiteboard, once filled with optimistic sketches, now a blank canvas.

He sat on the couch, the worn fabric offering no comfort. His fingers fidgeted, picking at the loose threads, a nervous habit that betrayed his inner turmoil. He tried to watch TV, but the images blurred, the laughter of the characters sounding like a cruel joke.

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