self-critical - Story 127019 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of freshly baked bread filled the small apartment, but it did little to ease the tension. Her niece, Lily, announced she was embracing the Rastafari faith. Eleanor felt a wave of dizziness.

She busied herself with setting the table, the familiar actions failing to calm her. She had always been the one to maintain the family traditions, the one who held onto the past. Lily, with her vibrant energy, had always been so open to new experiences.

Eleanor stared at the plates, the sunlight catching the delicate porcelain. She felt like a relic, left behind, out of touch. She felt a familiar hollowness grow within her. Had she not been exciting enough? Had she not made their traditions interesting enough?

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