self-critical - Story 127949 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He found the manuscript hidden amongst the cooking books, a cruel irony. The character, based on him, was dull, predictable, and lacking in any real ambition. The words seemed to jump off the page and sting.

He felt the familiar sting of inadequacy. He thought about the goals he had set, the ones he had failed to achieve. He thought of his partner's success, and his own perceived failures. He felt the tightness in his chest grow.

He closed the book and put it back, the act feeling like a cowardly admission of defeat. He couldn't even bring himself to confront her. He didn't deserve it.

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