self-critical - Story 127717 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The small, cramped apartment amplified her anxiety. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She'd been so sure this time would be different. But here she was, the dreaded notice clutched in her hand.

She ran a hand through her hair, tangling it further. Every missed deadline, every ignored email, every time she’d promised herself she’d be better, flashed before her eyes. She hadn't been able to make it work.

A wave of nausea washed over her. She was a failure, and she deserved to pay the price. The apartment, her life, everything… a complete and utter mess. She couldn’t even look at her reflection.

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