self-critical - Story 127361 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The card was a blur of pink and glitter. *Happy Birthday!* it shouted, a jaunty font mocking the way Amelia felt. She’d spent the last hour staring at her reflection, picking apart the lines around her eyes, the way her smile seemed crooked. Now this. An unsigned card. She held it at arm's length, as if it might bite.

She retreated inside, the chill air of the morning suddenly feeling oppressive. The unopened mail sat scattered on the kitchen counter, but she couldn't bring herself to sort through it. Instead, she poured a cup of lukewarm coffee and stared out the window, the image of the card's anonymous sender a constant intrusion in her mind. Did they pity her?

The coffee tasted bitter.

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