self-critical - Story 127618 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Ava, seated between her two well-dressed siblings, felt the phantom prickle of their success. She felt small, insignificant. The banquet hall was awash in the glow of the awards and decorations. She had brought some notes, but she doubted she’d use them. They felt silly.

She could feel the weight of expectation, the pressure to deliver something memorable. The thought of being the disappointment of the night filled her with a sense of dread.

When her turn came, her hands trembled as she reached for the microphone. Her voice was barely a whisper. She struggled to maintain eye contact, feeling as though everyone could see right through her.

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