self-critical - Story 127215 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“You remember it completely differently,” Martha said to her friend, Sarah. Sarah nodded, smiling, but it felt like a condescending gesture. Martha felt the familiar sting of doubt.

They were talking about a camping trip. Martha recalled it as a triumphant adventure, despite some challenging weather. Sarah's recollection was full of complaints, about the rain, the cold, the overall misery of the experience. The vividness of Martha’s memories felt suddenly suspect, as though she’d built them on a foundation of sand.

She picked at a loose thread on her jeans, her gaze dropping to the floor. The weight of Sarah’s perspective was crushing. Had she been blind to the obvious? Had she romanticized a painful 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