self-critical - Story 127991 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email shimmered on her phone. "Congratulations! Your essay, 'The Unfolding of a Seed,' has been selected for publication as a model essay..." Her stomach immediately clenched. She scrolled down, heart hammering against her ribs, until she saw it: her meticulously crafted story about tending a neglected garden. It felt alien now, the prose stiff, the metaphors clumsy. She tossed the phone onto the bed, then paced the small room.

The essay had seemed brilliant then. She'd spent weeks revising, polishing each sentence. Now, the words felt brittle, lacking the depth she craved. She pictured the editors, nodding approvingly, while she, standing in their shoes, would find it pedestrian at best. She wanted to disappear.

She grabbed a protein bar and ripped the wrapper with more force than necessary. The taste was chalky. She chewed slowly, avoiding looking at her reflection.

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