self-critical - Story 127081 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The invitation sat on Amelia's fridge, a cheerful orange square. "Fence Warming! Come celebrate our new barrier!" It mocked her, she decided. She hadn't even managed to weed her own pathetic patch of lawn, let alone build a whole new boundary. Amelia crumpled the paper, then smoothed it out, smoothing out the tiny flaws in the print, as if that would somehow fix *her*.

Her gaze fell on her own overgrown rose bushes, desperately clinging to life. They were a mess. She was a mess. She had meant to prune them weeks ago. The neighbor’s immaculate, freshly painted fence suddenly seemed to amplify her perceived shortcomings.

She poured a cup of lukewarm coffee, then promptly dumped it down the sink. It wasn't just the fence. It was the neighbor’s perfect family, the gleaming car in the driveway, the effortless way they seemed to navigate the world. Amelia sighed, the weight of her perceived failures pressing down on her chest.

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