self-critical - Story 127709 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The office was a dull gray, mirroring the haze of self-doubt that had settled over Clara. She'd just received some feedback on her latest project, and it had left her feeling utterly deflated. The words of criticism lingered in her mind, repeating like a broken record.

"Camp Whispering Pines?" Alex said, his voice bright. "Best summer of my life." He was smiling, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

Clara felt a knot tighten in her stomach. Whispering Pines. The place where she'd felt most out of place. She remembered the relentless pressure to compete, the constant feeling of inadequacy. She had not had a good time.

"Oh," she said quietly, her voice barely audible. "I...I went there too."

Alex began to share stories of his adventures at camp, his stories filled with laughter and excitement. Clara felt the familiar sting of envy. She had always found it hard to fit in. She looked at her hands, suddenly noticing a smudge of ink on her fingernail.

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