self-critical - Story 127058 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bell above the door of the pawn shop seemed to announce her arrival as a harbinger of ill fortune. Every dusty trinket, every forgotten object, seemed to mock her. Her hands felt clumsy, her movements awkward. She felt like an imposter.

She picked over the displays, trying to appear nonchalant. The shop owner, a woman with a hawk-like gaze, seemed to assess her every move. She felt the familiar pressure in her chest, the weight of her inadequacies.

There it was. The ring. A reminder of what she had lost, and what she had failed to protect. Its beauty seemed to taunt her.

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