self-critical - Story 127190 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The weight of the unopened letter pressed down on her chest. Another month of silence, another month of unanswered questions. She didn’t know who was on the other end of those late-night calls. She hated her. It was always her fault.

She felt a familiar tightening in her stomach, a physical manifestation of her inner turmoil. The dust motes dancing in the sunlight seemed to mock her. She felt like an outsider, a ghost in her own life. She felt the need to apologize for everything.

She sank onto the couch, the worn cushions offering no comfort. She was so ashamed of her flaws, of her inadequacies. She closed her eyes, the phantom taste of failure bitter on her tongue. The letter remained unopened, a symbol of her powerlessness, her perceived weakness.

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