self-critical - Story 127295 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence in the kitchen was deafening. Lisa stared at the forgotten cake sitting on the counter, its frosting beginning to crack. Her friend, Maria, had just texted, "Change of plans, honey. Party's off."

Lisa felt a sudden burning in her eyes. She’d spent all day baking, decorating, fretting over every detail. She always went overboard, always did too much. Everyone probably felt suffocated by her. Another thing she’d failed at.

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