self-critical - Story 127031 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The book lay open on the kitchen table, spine cracked. Sarah’s name, in elegant script, dominated the cover. *Sarah Miller: A Life Unfurled*. It was a life, alright, one she hadn’t given permission for, and the details – the embarrassing middle school talent show fiasco, the disastrous first date with Mark – were mortifyingly accurate. Her stomach churned, a familiar feeling when she felt she’d failed. She slammed the door to the kitchen and retreated to her bedroom, the words echoing in her mind.

A cold compress pressed to her forehead was her only comfort. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, painting stripes across her duvet. She wished she could disappear. She hated the way she looked, the way she sounded, the way she still couldn’t seem to get anything quite right. Why did everyone else seem to know how to navigate life with such ease?

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