self-critical - Story 127197 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The school website had a list of teachers. *Mr. Harrison, Sixth Grade.* Maria felt a knot of familiar dread in her stomach. Mr. Harrison. The teacher who had always belittled her artistic aspirations. She felt herself shrinking back, as if she were still that small girl.

She found herself becoming overly involved in her daughter, Lily's, art projects. She would make constant suggestions, but she quickly regretted it. She was being a menace. She was pushing her own issues onto Lily.

Lily had begun to lose interest. Lily had found the projects stressful. Maria tried to stop herself. She kept trying to back down. She had become someone she hated.

She tried to encourage Lily. It was hard. She had always felt that she was wrong. She felt the same fear that she had felt as a kid.

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