self-critical - Story 127045 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Honestly," Clara muttered, the sound of hammering echoing in her ears. The noise was more than an inconvenience; it was a judgement. It implied purpose and productivity, things she felt she lacked.

She tried to concentrate on the crossword puzzle, but her mind kept drifting. She found herself meticulously straightening the magazines on her coffee table, arranging them by size and color. It was a futile attempt to control a world that felt spiraling out of control.

Later, she called her mother, but found herself unable to enjoy the conversation. She felt inadequate compared to her sister. She ended the call quickly, feeling a familiar tightness in her chest, the feeling that she was failing.

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