self-critical - Story 127655 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The restaurant buzzed with a Saturday night energy. Chloe, flushed with the first tentative feelings of a new relationship, had sent a giddy message to her friend. She was so excited that she forgot to check the recipient. Now, the text that read “He's actually cute, not like the losers I usually attract!” was going to her date.

She felt the heat rise to her cheeks, the blood pounding in her ears. He was probably mortified, she thought, and she had ruined the night. She was forever messing things up. She was a disaster.

Chloe stared at her food, suddenly repulsed by the sight of it. She didn't deserve a pleasant evening, and she knew she would never find happiness, no matter how hard she tried.

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