self-critical - Story 127710 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The constant hum of the air conditioning seemed to amplify the internal pressure building inside Thomas. He'd been reviewing his presentation for the upcoming meeting, and every sentence, every slide, felt wrong. He was sure he’d overlooked something critical.

"Whispering Pines, huh?" Laura said with a smile. “Such a blast from the past.”

Thomas’s chest tightened. He hadn't thought of that place in years.

“You, too?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Yeah!” she exclaimed, launching into a story about a camp prank.

Thomas remembered the feeling of being perpetually out of sync, the sense of not quite measuring up.

He felt the familiar pressure in his chest. He looked away, his gaze falling on the blank wall across the room.

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