self-critical - Story 127091 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chipped mug warmed Amelia’s hands, but did little to thaw the iciness spreading through her chest. She watched her mother, humming as she arranged the grocery bags on the counter, then quickly looked away, as if caught doing something wrong. "Need any help?" she managed, her voice smaller than she intended. It had only been a week, and already the space felt constricted, not just the physical square footage, but something in the air itself. Every dropped crumb, every unwashed dish, felt like a deliberate act of defiance, a testament to her failure.

She busied herself with the dishes, scrubbing until her knuckles were red, even though her mother insisted she didn't have to. The water ran cold, but she barely noticed. A shadow passed over her. "You okay, honey?" Her mother's voice, laced with concern, made her jump.

"Fine," she replied, her tone sharp, then immediately regretted it. She took a breath. "Just… tired, I guess."

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