self-critical - Story 127053 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The grit of the city seemed to cling to her skin as she entered the pawn shop. Every step she took felt like a monumental failure, the weight of her mistakes pressing down on her. The shop itself was a monument to other people's bad luck, a place that mirrored her current state.

She feigned casual interest, browsing the chipped ceramics and broken radios. The owner, a man with a perpetually bored expression, watched her with narrowed eyes. He knew. Everyone always knew. She felt the familiar sting in the back of her throat, the prelude to a welling up of shame.

Finally, she saw it. The ring. Its sparkle, even through the grime, seemed to mock her. A wave of nausea washed over her. She knew she shouldn't have failed, should have been better.

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