self-critical - Story 127942 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He found the laptop open, the glow of the screen illuminating the late-night darkness. Leo, a man accustomed to flaws, felt his already fragile confidence shatter as he scrolled through his partner’s draft. It wasn’t a love letter; it was a character assassination.

The character, named after him, was indecisive, prone to anxiety, and, most damningly, boring. Leo ran a hand through his hair, the gesture more frantic than usual. He felt a hot flush crawl up his neck.

He looked around the room, at the carefully curated space they shared, a space he had always felt out of place in. Was this what he represented? A meticulously constructed facade, hiding a void of personality? He bit the inside of his cheek, a familiar habit when he was struggling.

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