self-critical - Story 127997 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He’d found out through a casual conversation with a current student. “Oh yeah, they use your essay, ‘The Art of Disassembly,’ in the admissions guide.” His smile felt brittle. It felt wrong.

He felt a deep sense of embarrassment. He’d poured his heart into it, tried to sound insightful. Now, re-reading it, the vulnerability felt like a blunder. It all seemed so… adolescent.

He retreated to his workshop, the scent of wood and sawdust filling the air. He started working on a complex project, losing himself in the intricate details, trying to silence the voice that whispered judgments.

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