self-critical - Story 127095 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The smell of pancakes wafted from the kitchen, a scent that normally would have cheered Leo. Now, it just felt suffocating. He watched his father, meticulously flipping the pancakes, his brow furrowed in concentration. The perfect form of the pancakes served as yet another reminder of his own flaws.

He mumbled a greeting, hoping to disappear back into his room, but his father gestured towards the table. Leo sat, picking at the food, the taste suddenly bitter. He felt a constant pressure, a tiny weight on his shoulders.

"Anything interesting happen yesterday?" his father asked, his voice casual. Leo shrugged, unable to meet his eyes. The question hung in the air, loaded with unspoken expectations.

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