self-critical - Story 127088 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of freshly sawn wood filled the air, a scent that only intensified as the fence went up. Mark watched from his porch, a knot forming in his stomach.

He should be out there, weeding his garden, but the energy just wasn’t there. He was always struggling to meet his own standards. He’d started so many projects, yet finished so few.

He felt a familiar twinge as he saw the new fence, straight and clean, a testament to efficiency. His own efforts, by contrast, felt clumsy and inadequate. He glanced at the overflowing trash cans, the untrimmed bushes.

He went inside, and decided to spend the day watching TV.

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