self-critical - Story 127260 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The discovery came at the worst possible time: a celebration dinner for her parents’ anniversary. “Oh, it’s wonderful!” her mother had exclaimed, pointing at the article on her phone, "Such clever writing." The name listed as the author was not her own. The room spun.

She could barely swallow, the food suddenly tasteless. She excused herself, the cheerful chatter of the party fading as she escaped into the quiet bathroom.

She stared at her reflection, the image blurring behind a veil of unshed tears. Was she ever going to measure up? Her mind screamed.

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