self-critical - Story 127904 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news broke during her shift at the campus library. A student franticly asked where to find a counselor to discuss how he'll pay for the next semester. She barely blinked, she knew what he was referring to. The details were a blur to her, but the overall message was there. The college was shutting down. Her stomach twisted, a hard knot of panic.

She retreated to the back room, the familiar smell of old books suddenly oppressive. She should have known. She should have saved more money. She should have chosen a practical major. She felt her face flush, the blood roaring in her ears.

The feeling of failure was a cold, constricting hand. All of those late nights, all of the effort. What was it all worth now? She leaned against the shelves, the spines of the books pressing into her back. Worthless.

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