self-critical - Story 127820 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The ticking of the clock on the wall felt like a relentless accusation. Emily ran her hands over her arms, trying to will away the goosebumps. She felt unworthy, like a failure. She had a list of things she wanted to fix, and felt constantly failing to address them.

She’d finally admitted to needing help. The thought of admitting failure still made her shoulders tighten. Now, staring at the nameplate, "Dr. Marcus Bell," she felt a fresh wave of humiliation. This was her worst nightmare.

When the door opened, and Marcus Bell stood there, she felt a familiar flush creep up her neck. He wasn't smiling. And she knew she'd be disappointing him.

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