self-critical - Story 127532 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Rain lashed against the library windows, mirroring the storm inside Leo. The scholarship, a lifeline, snatched away. He re-read the withdrawal letter, the words blurring into an indecipherable mess. He'd been so sure, so certain. Now, doubt gnawed at him.

He slammed the book shut, the sound echoing in the near-empty room. He felt a flush creep up his neck, and avoided eye contact with the librarian. He envisioned his parents' faces, the sacrifices they had made. The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on him.

He walked aimlessly, the wet pavement soaking into his shoes. He replayed the past months, searching for any misstep, any moment he could have prevented this. The search, fruitless, only deepened the despair. He wanted to hide, to shrink from the world's gaze.

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