self-critical - Story 127318 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air in the living room felt heavy. David, usually the picture of relaxed composure, fidgeted with the remote, the channels flickering across the screen. He knew Sarah had been taking lessons, but seeing the notebook on the coffee table, filled with meticulously written notes and phonetic translations, still managed to deliver a blow.

He picked up the book, flipping through the pages, each character a tiny stab of discomfort.

He tossed it back down, unable to meet her gaze when she entered the room. He felt himself bracing, a familiar tension settling in his shoulders. He didn’t want to be compared.

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