self-critical - Story 127513 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The gymnasium lights seemed to glare down on Ethan. He felt like everyone was watching him, judging him. He’d practiced tirelessly, sacrificing everything – friends, sleep, even his grades. Yet, here he was, staring blankly at the team roster posted on the wall. His name wasn't there. He felt a burning sensation in his cheeks, and the air seemed to thicken around him. He ran a hand through his already messy hair, a nervous habit he’d developed over the past few weeks, his mind filled with a barrage of "what ifs."

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