self-critical - Story 127526 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the email, the words blurring before his eyes. It was a link to a blog post, a detailed analysis of the alleged plagiarism committed by his literary hero, Charles R. Beaumont. A knot of unease tightened in his chest.

His apartment felt cluttered and dusty, the remnants of a life he couldn't quite grasp. He had always been so careful, so deliberate, so unsure of himself. He’d always felt like a fraud, the product of his imagination.

He ran his fingers through his hair. He felt a deep sense of wrongness. He considered throwing everything away.

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