self-critical - Story 127228 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The scent of lavender filled the room, a perfume her mother had always worn. John, feeling completely inadequate after a failed attempt at a new relationship, was sorting through his old things. He found a box filled with his elementary school projects.

He picked up a story about a dragon, the spelling errors numerous, the plot cliché. He felt a sharp pang of shame, his cheeks burning. He remembered the feeling of failure.

He shoved the papers back into the box, overwhelmed. He felt exposed, judged, and fundamentally lacking. He imagined his mother looking over his shoulder, a look of quiet disappointment on her face.

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