self-critical - Story 127676 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

David felt a knot tighten in his stomach. Professor Lee was moving to a different university. Another setback. He’d known, of course, that he hadn't produced the quality of work he should have.

He replayed their last meeting in his head, reliving every hesitation, every poorly-formed answer. He should have been more prepared, more knowledgeable. He could almost feel the professor's disappointment. He ran a hand over his tired face.

He found himself pacing his apartment, restless and agitated. He wanted to scream. He was a fraud. The knot in his stomach tightened further.

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