self-critical - Story 127910 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He was driving home, the announcement echoing in his mind like a broken record. The highway stretched before him, an endless expanse of asphalt and uncertainty. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white.

He should have chosen a different field of study. He should have transferred to a better school. He should have… He replayed every perceived mistake, every missed opportunity, every moment of weakness. The familiar feeling of inadequacy tightened in his chest.

He blinked, the tears blurring his vision. The car drifted slightly, and he corrected the steering, a surge of adrenaline momentarily overriding the crushing weight of his emotions. It was all his fault. The car, the degree, his future… All his failure.

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