self-critical - Story 127539 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sports arena, usually a source of exhilaration for Mateo, felt oppressive. He stared at the scoreboard, the scores of his rivals mocking him. The scholarship had vanished, taking with it his dreams. He stood stiffly by himself.

He missed his winning shot at practice, then again, and again. He felt clumsy, his body a burden. He found himself avoiding his teammates, afraid of their pity. His coach's words now felt like a condemnation.

He sat on the bench, hunched over, his hands clasped tightly. He felt like he had failed everyone, starting with himself. He wanted to scream.

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