self-critical - Story 127644 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The office air suddenly felt thick, heavy. Mark stared at the email, the words blurring. He'd poured his heart and soul into this company, and it all felt futile. He’d made a mistake last quarter with the Johnson account. A huge one.

His shoulders slumped as he reread the announcement. His stomach clenched. He’d been too cautious, too hesitant to speak up during the last team meeting. Now this. He always second-guessed himself. He felt like he'd always been on the verge of failure.

He picked at a loose thread on his sweater. He should have been better.

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