self-critical - Story 127665 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence felt like a tangible thing, pressing down on Ben’s shoulders. He’d told the joke, the one he’d been practicing all week. It hadn’t landed. He could feel the sting of embarrassment creeping up his neck. The way Sarah, his coworker, had offered that polite, almost pitying smile.

He crossed his arms, the action a deliberate attempt at appearing nonchalant. He needed to stop being so desperate to please, so desperate to be liked. It was exhausting.

He tried to focus on his breathing, but the image of his lackluster sales report kept popping into his head.

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