self-critical - Story 127596 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Thank you for your submission..." The phrase was a dagger, followed by the soft, yet devastating, "not quite what we are looking for at this time." Sarah tossed the computer on the desk.

She hated the way her hands trembled when she got like this. She hated that her first thought was to blame herself. Her apartment seemed to shrink, closing in around her. The air grew thick, making it hard to breathe.

She marched into the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face. Her reflection was a stranger, a gaunt, defeated woman. She looked at her work. At all the years. All the effort. It was all a mistake, and she was a fool for even trying.

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