self-critical - Story 127036 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The book, *The Gardener of Souls*, stared up at him. John’s name, his life, laid bare for all to see. A life of quiet desperation, the book had so casually, so dismissively, described. He felt like his heart was cracking, a slow erosion of his core.

He found himself wandering through the garden, the very garden described in excruciating detail. He hated the way he was. Every wilted leaf, every overgrown weed, seemed to mirror his own perceived shortcomings. He kicked at a loose stone, a wave of familiar disappointment washing over him. The book had cut him deeper than he thought possible.

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