self-critical - Story 127056 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The grime-covered windows of the pawn shop seemed to reflect her own bleak outlook. She hated how easily she crumpled, how quickly she fell apart. This was supposed to be a triumph. A gesture of amends. Now, it was just another humiliating episode.

The shopkeeper, a man whose face seemed permanently etched with boredom, just pointed a greasy finger in the direction of the jewelry display. She felt the familiar knot tighten in her stomach. It was her fault. All of it.

The ring sat there, its brilliance dimmed by the dusty glass. She was sure she didn’t deserve the ring to begin with.

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