self-critical - Story 127328 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The phone vibrated. Chef Anya ignored it. It was probably her mother, asking about the review. “Unimaginative…a waste of time,” the article had said. Anya had always valued her mother’s opinion, and this made things all the more difficult.

She spent the day avoiding her staff, hiding in the walk-in, the cold air doing nothing to soothe the burning in her chest. She found herself staring at the open boxes of vegetables, the vibrant colors now seemed to mock her.

She was sure her mother was disappointed in her, but she couldn't bear to talk to her. She looked at her reflection in the walk-in door and felt a sudden, crushing sense of despair.

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