self-critical - Story 127598 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email confirmation of the rejection arrived as she was about to eat dinner. She didn't have the appetite to eat the meal she had made. She set the plate down on the counter and began to pace.

Her steps were quick and agitated. She ran a hand through her hair, the movement jerky. The words of the email echoed in her mind: "Not the right fit." Not good enough. Not worthy.

She picked up her phone and mindlessly scrolled through social media, each post a curated snapshot of success, each image a painful reminder of her perceived shortcomings. She put the phone down, feeling the familiar sting of self-doubt.

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