self-critical - Story 127285 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The message was from Emily Carter. Her phone vibrated on the table, and she jumped, spilling coffee on her already stained yoga pants. She’d been trying to meditate for the past hour, attempting to clear her mind. The silence was overwhelming, amplifying every perceived flaw, every past mistake.

She’d started a new fitness regime, attempting to tone her body. But every stretch, every push-up, was a reminder of her failures. The request was a slap in the face. A reminder of the years of ridicule.

She threw her phone across the room. She was so very tired. Everything felt like a struggle.

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