self-critical - Story 127718 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He reread the notice, each word a condemnation. He hated the way his stomach clenched, the familiar tightening in his chest. He’d been warned, of course. He’d ignored it. He'd made the same mistakes again and again.

The apartment, once a sanctuary, now felt like a prison. He kicked at a loose board on the floor. He should be better than this. He felt like he was constantly failing at life. He couldn't even keep a roof over his head.

He let out a shaky breath, the air thick with despair. He'd disappointed everyone. Mostly himself. The crushing weight of his inadequacies settled upon him, heavy and unyielding.

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