self-critical - Story 127536 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Zara meticulously straightened the books on her shelf, each movement mechanical. The scholarship withdrawal had left her feeling adrift. She was supposed to be a success story, the one who made it. Now…what?

She kept practicing her cello, the music a desperate attempt to maintain control. Each note felt strained, her normally fluid movements jerky. She paused, the weight of the instrument suddenly heavy on her shoulder.

She found herself avoiding all social gatherings. She felt like a fraud, undeserving of the life she’d been building. The world seemed to be closing in around her. The familiar melody she was playing began to sound warped, wrong.

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