self-critical - Story 127319 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The scent of garlic and herbs filled the apartment, but for Theo, the aroma did little to soothe. He found Liam, his partner, humming in the kitchen, a cookbook open on the counter. The cookbook was in Theo’s native language.

He watched Liam stir a pot, his brow furrowed in concentration. The familiar words, now being spoken by someone else, felt like a trespass.

"What's that?" Theo asked, the edge in his voice sharper than he intended.

Liam jumped, startled. "Oh, just trying a new recipe."

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