self-critical - Story 127286 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the screen, the cursor blinking mockingly next to the ‘Accept’ button. It was from Ben Carter. He was sitting in his messy, neglected garden, the weeds growing faster than anything he planted. He had been trying to grow vegetables, but the tomatoes had withered, and the zucchini plants were overrun with pests.

He felt a familiar pang of shame. He’d always felt like he was falling behind. Compared to Ben, he *was* falling behind. He’d always felt like he was disappointing everyone.

He closed the browser window. He just couldn't face it. He wasn't ready.

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