self-critical - Story 127071 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Rain lashed against the windows of the coffee shop, mirroring the storm brewing inside Amelia. She chewed on her thumbnail, the chipped nail a testament to her fidgety nature. The online friend, 'StarryEyedGal', had suggested this cafe. Amelia had been so excited about meeting her, but now, parked in the corner booth, she felt a familiar knot tightening in her stomach.

She pulled the oversized scarf tighter around her neck, as if it could physically protect her from some imagined judgment. StarryEyedGal had only seen a blurry profile picture. Still, the thought of being seen 'in the flesh' made her want to disappear.

A sudden chime from the door announced someone’s arrival, and Amelia hunched further down. Her face burned. Maybe she should just leave before…

A girl with vibrant purple hair and a familiar, heart-shaped birthmark on her cheek strode toward her. “Amelia?” the girl asked, her voice bright. Amelia’s jaw dropped.

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