self-critical - Story 127530 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The rain hammered against the windows, mirroring the storm inside of Owen. He had just read a blog post, a meticulous examination of his favorite author’s latest novel, and the origins of its themes. Owen's own unfinished manuscript, filled with the same ideas, sat gathering dust in a drawer.

He felt the familiar sting of tears. He hadn’t been able to finish his book. He felt like his ideas were stolen, now tainted, worthless.

He wandered through his cluttered apartment, a maze of half-finished projects and discarded dreams. He felt adrift, lost at sea, unable to find a safe harbor.

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