self-critical - Story 127987 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news felt like a physical blow to Maya. She felt a jolt of anger and despair. She was always the last to know, the one left behind. She felt an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. She was always the weakest link.

She walked around her apartment, a space she had curated with care and affection. The carefully chosen artwork, the plants she nurtured, the comfortable sofa – it all felt fragile and temporary. She hadn’t achieved the success she craved, and this felt like a tangible representation of that failure.

She ran her hand over a scratch on the wooden table, a reminder of her clumsiness. Why was she so careless? Why couldn't she keep things nice? Her breath hitched.

She opened the door to the balcony, the city sounds rushing in like a judgement. She was going to be left in the rubble.

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