self-critical - Story 127015 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The phone felt heavy in her hand. Her daughter, Emily, had just told her, "Mom, I’m joining the Wiccan faith. It's how I feel truly connected." Maria stared blankly out the window. The trees seemed to sway mockingly in the wind.

Maria's breath hitched. She had always tried to be the perfect mother, the supportive friend. Had she not fostered enough independence? Had she been too overbearing? She ran a hand through her hair, a nervous gesture.

She felt a hollowness spreading through her. Emily had always been independent and strong-willed, but Maria had hoped, selfishly perhaps, that her daughter would follow in her footsteps, with the same values. Now, with this new faith, Maria felt pushed to the side, irrelevant. She felt like she'd failed.

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