self-critical - Story 127054 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bell above the pawn shop door jingled, a sound that grated on her nerves. The air inside felt thick, heavy with the scent of old things and regrets. She pulled her scarf tighter, as if to shield herself from the judgment she felt radiating from the chipped porcelain dolls and tarnished silverware. It was always like this.

She approached the counter, her hands clammy. The owner, a woman with a severe bun and even more severe eyes, barely acknowledged her. "Looking for something?" she asked, her voice flat.

He didn't deserve her love. Not after what he had done. But the ring was there, glinting under the harsh light. The sight of it, though, was a stinging reminder of all she had ruined.

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