self-critical - Story 127221 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The attic air hung thick with dust and the ghosts of forgotten things. Sarah coughed, pulling a moth-eaten blanket tighter around her. She was supposed to be cleaning, a task she always approached with a heavy heart, her thoughts inevitably turning inward. She stumbled upon a trunk, its brass hinges green with age. Inside, nestled amongst yellowed tissue paper, were stacks of her old schoolwork.

A wave of heat washed over her face as she lifted a faded book report, her handwriting shockingly immature. *Poor* her parents had scrawled in the margins, the word seeming to leap off the page and punch her in the gut. Why would her mother keep *this*?

She slammed the trunk shut, a sudden urge to flee bubbling up in her chest. The attic became suffocating, the air too close, the past too present. She imagined her mother watching, smiling in a way that felt disapproving.

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