self-critical - Story 127738 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drive home felt longer than usual. The news hung in the air: Sarah, his closest confidant, was relocating to the West Coast. His stomach churned. The radio droned on, a meaningless soundtrack to his internal turmoil.

He replayed their last conversation. Did he sound too preoccupied? Too indifferent? He’d been so caught up in his own minor worries, completely oblivious. He berated himself for his shortcomings.

He pulled into his driveway, the house looming dark and silent. He should have been a better friend. He'd failed.

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