self-critical - Story 127200 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The kindergarten orientation. *Ms. Davis, Kindergarten.* Emily felt a jolt of anxiety. Ms. Davis. The teacher who had said she was too quiet. The teacher who had made her feel like something was wrong with her. She was terrified.

She spent the weeks before school researching the best social skills for her son, Sam. She read countless books. She practiced icebreakers with him. She was concerned that he would not fit in.

She made sure that he always had the best clothes. She spent a lot of time helping him. She was paranoid of what the teacher would think.

She could remember being constantly reprimanded. She remembered feeling like an outsider. She wanted to protect Sam from the same experience.

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