self-critical - Story 127700 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He walked into the office the day after the announcement and felt an overwhelming desire to disappear. He retreated to his cubicle, the walls closing in as if they were closing in on his career. The fluorescent lights seemed to mock him, each flicker a reminder of his inadequacies.

He spent the morning scrolling through LinkedIn, comparing himself to others, feeling a crushing weight of self-reproach. He felt a tightening in his chest, a sensation of being utterly alone in his perceived failures. He skipped lunch, unable to face the forced pleasantries.

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