self-critical - Story 127495 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air in the library felt stifling, and Ethan felt himself needing air. He reread the patent details, as if repetition would somehow change the outcome. His "revolutionary" solar panel design was nothing more than a footnote in someone else's achievement.

His hands shook as he closed the book, the tremor betraying the anxiety that gnawed at him. He stood abruptly, knocking over the chair with a loud crash. He felt the eyes of the other patrons on him.

He gathered his things, his movements clumsy and hurried. He felt a desperate need to escape the building, to flee from the scene of his intellectual inadequacy.

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