self-critical - Story 127085 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The first thing I saw when I opened the curtains was their new fence. It was a perfect, pristine white, a stark contrast to my peeling paint and neglected landscaping. My gut clenched.

I hated that I let it bother me so much. I'd been meaning to paint the house, plant some flowers, improve the front yard. But somehow, I never got around to it. Other things always seemed more pressing, or maybe I was just... lazy?

The fence, an elegant testament to their diligence, was the final nail. It made my shortcomings even more conspicuous. I pulled the curtains shut, suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of deep embarrassment.

The thought of facing them, of seeing their perfect fence every day, filled me with dread.

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