self-critical - Story 127656 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He had been so proud of the new job offer, almost overwhelmed by it. David had wanted to share his excitement, sending a celebratory message to his brother. A careless slip, and the congratulatory text now lay with the manager who had interviewed him. The text was full of exuberant, perhaps unprofessional, language.

His smile vanished instantly. He imagined the judgement in his interviewer's face, the swift dismissal. He was utterly worthless. His potential was minimal. He'd never be able to hold down a job, a relationship, anything.

He slumped back in his chair, suddenly unable to enjoy his coffee, a bitter taste filling his mouth. Everything he touched crumbled. He was a failure.

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