self-critical - Story 127969 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He picked up the crumpled list from the floor. It was Laura’s, and the words, so carefully written, seemed to judge him. “Write a book,” it said, among other things. He had always been the more grounded one, happy with his steady job and comfortable life.

He felt a familiar tightening in his chest. A creeping inadequacy settled upon him. He saw his own life in a new, unappealing light.

He sat on the couch, the list still in his hand. He was unsure of what to do. His fingers trembled.

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