self-critical - Story 127218 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of freshly baked bread usually soothed him. Today, it was cloying. “You really think I was that… dramatic?” Alex asked, trying to sound casual, but his voice cracked. His friend, Ben, was describing a falling out they’d had.

Ben’s version was balanced, fair, even. Alex’s recollection was a swirling vortex of anger and hurt. He had viewed the situation from the viewpoint of someone who was wronged. It felt like his own memories were being rendered invalid.

He pushed his plate away, suddenly unable to eat. The weight of his perceived overreaction settled in his stomach, a dull, heavy ache.

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