self-critical - Story 127692 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The announcement had come, and he’d tried to be happy for her, genuinely. But the congratulatory words felt thick on his tongue, a lie he could barely swallow. He’d retreated to his cubicle, the walls closing in. He replayed every interaction with the boss, every project review, searching for the fatal flaw he knew he possessed.

His hands shook as he opened the document outlining the new role. He scrutinized the requirements, each bullet point a measure of his failure. “Strategic thinking…” – a skill he secretly doubted he possessed. “Team leadership…” – a task he felt ill-equipped to handle.

He went home that evening, avoiding any mention of the promotion to his wife. He picked at his dinner, appetite gone. He started picking at a loose thread on his shirt, a nervous habit he hadn't indulged in years.

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