self-critical - Story 127688 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The stage lights seemed to bore into him as he sat in the darkened theater. His daughter, Lily, was performing in a play, her voice clear and strong as she delivered her lines. He’d once loved acting, the thrill of the performance, the camaraderie of the cast. He’d given it up years ago, for a “stable career”. Now, the stage felt like a phantom limb, a source of longing and regret. He was no longer the performer.

He gripped the armrests of his seat, watching his daughter shine. The happiness in her voice when she was on the stage was a physical blow. He felt old and out of place. He wanted to be up there with her, but he knew he no longer possessed the courage.

The curtain fell, and the audience erupted in applause. His hands remained still.

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