self-critical - Story 127922 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He hated the way his reflection looked in the clinic's bathroom mirror. The pale skin, the tired eyes, the faint tremor of his jaw – all indicators of his inner turmoil. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow responsible for his condition, a consequence of some flaw in his character.

He heard the door creak open, and a woman entered, her shoulders hunched as she quickly began washing her hands. He caught her eye in the mirror, and something in her gaze – a familiar shade of anxiety – registered with him.

“Is it true what they say about the waiting list?” she asked quietly, her voice sounding small, almost ashamed. He nodded, unable to meet her eyes.

"Years," he mumbled, feeling the familiar weight of disappointment and inadequacy settle on him. He knew he was letting her down. He was always letting people down.

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