self-critical - Story 127343 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

She watched the other people rummaging through the yard sale with a sense of weary resignation. This was supposed to be a fun activity, a way to relax. Instead, it always highlighted her shortcomings. She was so indecisive, so easily overwhelmed.

A small, stuffed animal sat on a blanket, its fur matted and its button eyes slightly askew. A wave of recognition washed over her. It was the bear her grandmother had given her. Theodore. She’d always managed to break everything; why had she broken this?

She approached the table, each step feeling heavy. The seller, a young man with a bored expression, looked at her expectantly. She felt a flush creep up her neck.

"How much…?" she began, her voice barely a whisper. She hated how weak she sounded.

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