self-critical - Story 127090 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"They must think I'm such a slob," I thought, watching the final section of the fence go up. My yard, a riot of weeds and overgrown shrubs, looked especially unkempt next to their pristine border.

I hadn't touched my lawn in months. Truthfully, I hadn’t touched much of anything. I’d meant to fix the broken window, paint the shed, but my energy just seemed to evaporate.

My cheeks burned with a familiar shame. The new fence, so perfectly aligned and thoughtfully crafted, was a direct reflection of my perceived faults. I felt a desperate urge to disappear, to avoid the judgement, real or imagined.

I turned away from the window, unable to bear the sight any longer.

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