self-critical - Story 127716 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the notice, the words blurring as tears welled in his eyes. He hated the way he'd let things go. He clenched his jaw, battling the surge of frustration and something even deeper -- a feeling of profound failure.

His gaze flicked around the apartment: the overflowing trash can, the pile of dishes in the sink, the unpaid bills stacked on the table. Each item was a physical manifestation of his inadequacy. He had no excuse.

He pressed his lips together in a tight line. He was always the problem. Always the one who messed things up. He didn't deserve a home. Or friends. Or anything, really.

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