self-critical - Story 127084 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sound of the saw sliced through the morning air, a relentless reminder. Liam felt the sting of comparison immediately. His neighbor, always so efficient, had finally decided to put up a fence. It looked sturdy and well-built. His own rickety, crumbling fence post barely survived the last storm.

He watched the workers from his window, a slow burn starting in his chest. He was behind in so many things, always struggling to catch up. He hadn’t even gotten around to fixing the leaky faucet, another item on the endless to-do list that seemed to grow daily.

He caught his reflection in the glass – tired eyes, a rumpled shirt. He looked away quickly. The new fence was a symbol, he decided. A symbol of everything he wasn't.

Liam went back to bed.

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