self-critical - Story 127615 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Mark stared at the elaborate buffet, finding himself inexplicably disgusted by it all. The rich, colorful food seemed to mock him, a reminder of his own perceived failings. He felt a constant pressure to measure up, to be the person his parents wanted him to be. And he was failing.

He sat alone at a table near the back, the festive atmosphere a painful contrast to his interior turmoil. The thought of having to stand up and speak felt unbearable. Every compliment they had ever given him felt insincere.

As his name was announced, his heart hammered against his ribs. He walked to the front, each step an act of defiance against his own insecurity.

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