self-critical - Story 127496 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Well, that's just fantastic," muttered Clara, her voice tight with suppressed frustration. The innovative water filtration system, years in development, was now just an also-ran in the technology race. She couldn't believe she'd missed it. It was the only thing she could think about now.

She slammed the laptop shut, the metallic click echoing in the otherwise silent apartment. She marched to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of chips from the pantry, ate most of it, and then threw the rest in the trash.

She began cleaning the apartment - scrubbing the counters, wiping down the appliances, as if the physical act could somehow cleanse her of the feeling of worthlessness. The more she cleaned, the more agitated she became.

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