self-critical - Story 127697 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news of the promotion had been a blow, a physical punch to the gut. He kept thinking about all the things he *should* have done, the opportunities he'd missed. He replayed the interview in his head, dissecting every answer, every gesture, searching for the fatal flaw.

He found himself avoiding his colleagues, afraid of the pitying glances, the forced smiles. He started skipping meetings, finding excuses to be unavailable. He didn't want to explain his failures to anyone.

He started drinking more than usual, a glass of wine to start the evening, then two, then three. The alcohol brought only temporary relief, followed by a deeper sense of despair.

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