self-critical - Story 127518 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence in the car was crushing. His father, usually so boisterous, drove in subdued quiet. The rejection from the team lingered in Ben’s mind. He stared out the window, watching the blurring scenery, a reflection of the chaos within him. He kept replaying his every error, every blunder, as if he could somehow rewind time and erase them. The weight of his own shortcomings seemed to physically constrict him.

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