self-critical - Story 127966 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

James felt a flush creep up his neck as he read through the list. It was Amelia’s, and the words practically jumped off the page: “Climb Mount Kilimanjaro,” “Learn to code,” “Write a novel.” He had no aspirations of his own.

He felt the familiar sting of comparison. She, ever the overachiever, was constantly pushing herself. He felt like he was falling behind, trapped in a rut he didn't know how to escape.

He found himself picking at a loose thread on the sofa. He didn't want to fail anyone. Not his wife, not his kids. Not himself. He found himself looking for things to do. The options were few.

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