self-critical - Story 127129 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The harsh fluorescent lights of the airport amplified her distress. Emily was slated to be at her nephew's birthday party, and she was stuck in place. The delay felt like a personal betrayal of her promises. *You are letting him down.* *You are always a disappointment.* The thoughts swirled, a maelstrom of disappointment.

She wrapped her arms around herself, as if trying to physically ward off the feeling. She pictured the party, the cake, the games, and most of all, the look on her nephew’s face as he opened his presents. The image triggered a fresh wave of mortification, her failure a heavy weight.

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