self-critical - Story 127348 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The cacophony of voices and the jostling of bodies felt overwhelming. He preferred solitude, but his wife had insisted. He was clumsy in social situations, always putting his foot in it. He wished he could just disappear.

He saw it, tucked away in the shadows of a rickety table. A brown bear, its fur worn thin, its stitched-on nose slightly askew. It was Bartholomew. He’d been so selfish back then.

He stood frozen, unable to approach. He would probably say something stupid. He always did.

He took a deep breath and approached the table, knowing he would make a fool of himself.

"How much for the…bear?" he asked, his voice cracking slightly.

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