self-critical - Story 127014 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence at the dinner table was thick enough to choke on. Michael, eyes downcast, pushed a piece of chicken around his plate. His brother, Ethan, had announced he was converting to Islam. Michael had responded with a mumbled "Okay."

He was always the quiet one, the observer. Ethan, the charismatic one, always drew the attention. He was always doing something interesting, something… important. Michael felt a familiar heat creep up his neck. Was he not exciting enough? Interesting enough?

He took a large gulp of water, the cold liquid doing little to soothe the tightness in his chest. He looked at Ethan, who was now explaining the tenets of his new faith with an earnestness that made Michael feel inadequate. He felt like a failure.

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