self-critical - Story 127930 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He hated the questions. The intrusive, probing questions. He felt like he was being scrutinized under a microscope. Each answer, he felt, was a failure.

She was in the waiting room, fiddling with a pen, avoiding eye contact. He knew what she was feeling, the internal battles. He knew it because he felt it too.

He approached her cautiously. “They asked you the usual questions, didn't they?” he said quietly. She looked up, her expression a mixture of fatigue and understanding.

“Yeah,” she replied, sighing. In that moment, he felt a strange sense of comfort. He wasn’t alone.

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