self-critical - Story 127866 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the whiteboard, the messy scribbles a testament to a lesson that had fallen flat. Mr. Evans had lost his rhythm, his enthusiasm. He'd poured his heart into this, and it had been a flop. The students' apathy felt like a personal rejection. He turned away from the empty classroom, wanting to disappear.

A delivery person handed him a large, unwieldy sculpture – a brightly painted, abstract representation of a tree. It was clearly the work of a student. A note, scrawled on the base, read: "You showed me how to see art, even when I didn't think I could. Thanks, Mr. Evans. - Alex." The sheer weight of the object, the physicality of the gesture, surprised 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