self-critical - Story 127073 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chipped paint on her apartment door mocked Clara. She’d spent an hour picking out her outfit: a flowy dress, something that hid… everything. Now, pacing the small space, she felt exposed. She felt the usual pressure, the familiar fear of scrutiny.

'BookwormBonnie' had been her lifeline during the loneliest parts of the pandemic. They bonded over their love of historical fiction. But now, in the harsh glare of reality, Clara felt inadequate.

She’d arranged to meet Bonnie at the local library. As she walked in, she saw someone with a stack of books at the front desk. The woman's back was turned. Clara felt a sudden urge to turn and run. The thought made her feel even worse.

The woman turned, and a smile split across her face. "Clara?"

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