self-critical - Story 127902 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

She hunched over her phone, the stark white of the email illuminating her face in the dim coffee shop. The scent of stale coffee suddenly felt rancid. “We regret to inform…” The words blurred, each syllable a brutal judgment. Her breath hitched. The barista called out her name, but she just stared at the screen, unable to move.

He should have been more diligent in his research, she berated herself silently. The rankings, the reviews… she'd dismissed them, blinded by the allure of a small, close-knit campus. Now, her naive romanticism felt like a childish mistake, a testament to her foolishness.

She pushed her untouched latte away from her. The clinking of the ceramic cup against the table was a loud, unforgiving sound. She felt the gaze of the other patrons, imagined they could see her shame, branded across her forehead. She was responsible for this, somehow. She felt the need to apologize to everyone, to explain.

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