self-critical - Story 127338 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The last time Eleanor had eaten at "The Wandering Wok" was…when? She couldn't remember. The memory was lost in the fog of her own preoccupation. She knew she had received the email, but the words felt like a blow.

She always criticized herself for not succeeding at things, and this was proof. She should have been more supportive, she should have gone more often. She should have recommended it to others.

She felt a bitter taste on her tongue. It was like she was trying to push away every good thing in her life. She was always looking for faults.

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