self-critical - Story 127093 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The doorbell chimed, and Sarah’s stomach lurched. It was her sister, visiting with her two perfect children. Sarah plastered a smile on her face, but it felt brittle. She watched, a silent observer, as her sister effortlessly navigated the demands of motherhood, the children’s laughter echoing through the house.

Her mother offered her a cup of tea, a gentle gesture that felt like a reminder of her own dependency. Sarah took a long sip, pretending to enjoy the warmth, while her internal critic chipped away at her. *Look at you*, it whispered. *Still here. Still dependent.*

She excused herself to "check emails," fleeing to the relative privacy of her childhood room, which, with the old stuffed animals and posters, felt even more childish than before.

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