self-critical - Story 127226 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Liam slumped onto the dusty floor of his parents’ garage, the cardboard box of his past looming before him. It was a project she’d started when he was just a kid: his mother had kept everything. He was always trying to measure up, constantly feeling like he was falling short.

He pulled out a science project, a volcano erupting with a pathetic amount of baking soda and vinegar. He remembered the disappointment, the feeling of inadequacy.

His cheeks flushed with heat. Why had she kept this? The contents of the box seemed to mock his every attempt at greatness. He felt an intense urge to run, to escape the suffocating weight of expectation.

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