self-critical - Story 127055 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stood in the doorway, momentarily paralyzed. The pawn shop’s doorway was like the entrance to a hall of mirrors, each reflecting a darker version of himself. He’d made a mess of everything, a series of missteps, errors in judgment, and broken promises. This was the inevitable consequence.

He scanned the crowded shelves, searching. His breath hitched as he finally spotted it. The familiar curve of the setting, the distinctive glint of the diamond. He wanted to run, to disappear. But he couldn't.

The ring. He was worthless.

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