self-critical - Story 127331 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The flickering neon sign of "Tony's Trattoria" always held a certain magic for Elias. Now, it was just a mocking reminder. He stared at the handwritten note taped to the door, announcing its closure next month. His stomach twisted. He’d known Tony for years; a warm, boisterous man who'd always remember Elias's usual order: spaghetti with extra meatballs.

He'd been so preoccupied lately. Too busy with work, with worrying about his stagnant career, with avoiding calls from his mother. He hadn't been to Tony's in over six weeks. Guilt pricked at him, sharp and unwelcome.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, avoiding the gaze of the elderly woman hobbling out of the building. He'd let this happen, hadn't he? He’d let something good, something comforting, slip away simply because he wasn't paying attention. He should have known. He should have gone more often.

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