self-critical - Story 127789 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The listing was a constant reminder for James. His childhood home, once the stage for his youthful ambitions and failures, was now someone else’s domain. He felt a familiar knot of discomfort tighten in his stomach. He wasn’t happy with his life, with his job.

He should have accomplished more. The glossy photographs of the renovated interior were just another sign of his shortcomings.

He threw his phone onto the table, the sound echoing in his small, cluttered apartment. He went back to the old, familiar feeling of inadequacy.

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