self-critical - Story 127020 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the small, intricately carved statue on the mantelpiece, a relic of his own childhood. His grandson, Leo, was embracing Neo-Paganism. Arthur felt a sudden, sharp stab of pain in his chest.

He ran a hand over his face, feeling the rough texture of his skin. He had always strived to be a good grandfather, to pass on his wisdom, his values. Had he been too old-fashioned? Too rigid?

He felt a deep sense of disconnect, as if a vital piece of him had been chipped away. He turned away from the statue, and a feeling of emptiness consumed him. He felt as though he couldn't keep up with the times, and it scared him.

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