self-critical - Story 127281 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The notification popped up: "Mark Thompson sent you a friend request." Amelia’s hand hovered over the 'Accept' button, then retreated. Her gaze flickered to the reflection in her laptop screen – the tired lines around her eyes, the unruly brown hair escaping her bun. She sighed. Why now? Why after all this time?

She’d spent the morning meticulously organizing her spice rack, alphabetizing each jar, wiping down every label. It was a compulsion. Perfection, even in a small way, felt like a victory these days. The request felt like a challenge, a reminder of the playground taunts she’d long tried to bury.

Her fingers trembled as she finally clicked ‘Decline.’ A small, fleeting sense of accomplishment surged through her. At least she still had some control.

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