self-critical - Story 127679 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Liam slammed his laptop shut, the sound echoing in his small bedroom. Professor Olsen's departure. Another blow. He was a mess.

He started cleaning, meticulously organizing his desk, straightening the books on his shelf, wiping down the dust that never seemed to end. Anything to avoid the gnawing feeling inside. He’d been floundering. He hadn't produced anything of value.

He caught his reflection in the mirror, and the sight of himself made him look away. He deserved this. He had only himself to blame.

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