self-critical - Story 127345 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air smelled of old newspapers and damp earth. She kept her arms crossed, a shield against the judgmental gazes she imagined were directed at her. She felt like an outsider, always clumsy, always messing things up.

She nearly missed it. But then, a flash of red fur, faded and tattered, caught her eye. It was Rupert. Her beloved bear. She should have treated him better.

She hesitated, her gaze darting around. She knew she shouldn’t, that she couldn't. It was just a stupid thing, and yet, a lump formed in her throat.

"How much?" she asked the man, her voice small. She hated how needy 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