self-critical - Story 127227 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The afternoon sun cast long shadows as Grace explored the recesses of her childhood home. In the attic, she found a box labeled "Grace's Treasures." Inside was a collection of relics from her school years, carefully preserved by her mother.

She held up a painting, a messy watercolor of a flower, her childish hand evident in every brushstroke. A sudden wave of self-loathing washed over her. She focused on the missed lines, the lack of skill, and the overall amateurishness.

She closed her eyes, a familiar knot tightening in her stomach. Every mistake, every flaw, seemed magnified under the harsh light of the past. The weight of her perceived failures pressed down on her, leaving her breathless.

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