self-critical - Story 127900 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The cold wind whipped around his face as he walked home. He kept his head down, avoiding the eyes of other students, fearing they would know his shame. The grade on his final was a disaster. He ran his hand through his hair, wishing he could erase the past semester. He kicked at a stray pebble in his path, sending it skittering across the sidewalk. He imagined the disappointment of his parents. His chest felt tight, constricted. He wanted to disappear. *You’re a disappointment*, a voice echoed in his head.

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