self-critical - Story 127600 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"We regret to inform you..." The standard phrase, a polite curtain call to his shattered dreams. He sat at his desk, staring at the screen. The words blurred, then sharpened, each one a testament to his perceived failings.

He felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to hide. He pulled the covers over his head, the darkness offering a temporary reprieve from the sting of disappointment. He was nothing, a waste of space. He had failed.

He lay there, motionless, the weight of the rejection crushing him, a heavy shroud of disillusionment settling over him. He hated the way he felt.

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