self-critical - Story 127346 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He avoided eye contact as he wandered through the cluttered yard. He felt a constant sense of inadequacy, as if he was always failing to measure up. The yard sale only served to highlight this feeling.

A collection of toys lay on a blanket, faded and forgotten. One of them, a brown bear with one ear missing, tugged at his heart. It was Bruno. He’d lost Bruno years ago, and even now, the memory stung.

His steps were slow as he approached. He felt a familiar knot of shame tightening in his stomach. He wasn't even good at keeping a teddy bear.

"How much for the bear?" he managed, his voice sounding thin and reedy.

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