self-critical - Story 127817 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The floral wallpaper seemed to mock Liam with its cheerfulness. He hated this feeling. He clenched his fists, forcing himself to breathe deeply. This was supposed to be a safe space. But he always seemed to mess things up. His posture was poor; he should have dressed better. His breathing was too loud.

He'd been so sure this was the right decision. Now, staring at the nameplate - "Dr. Marcus Bell" - he felt a crushing sense of inadequacy. He felt suddenly foolish, exposed, and vulnerable.

Then the door opened, and there he was. Marcus. Older, wiser, perhaps, but still. The blood drained from Liam's face. He knew he was already failing the session.

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