self-critical - Story 127230 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The weight of the unopened box pressed down on Oliver. He was in the process of moving, and this box of his childhood artifacts, preserved by his mother, lay unopened in the corner. He had been putting it off. Eventually, he had no choice.

He opened the box and saw his handwriting. The stories were juvenile. The math problems were wrong. A sense of deep unease washed over him.

He slammed the lid shut. His accomplishments felt hollow, his successes accidental. He was not sure he could face this, this reminder of all he had to prove.

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