self-critical - Story 127363 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The card, a simple drawing of a daisy, made her throat constrict. The handwriting was neat, almost too perfect. *Thinking of you!* it announced. She immediately wondered if her smile was too wide when she’d greeted the mail carrier. Did she look as old as she felt today?

She meticulously washed her hands, replaying the morning's events. The burnt toast. The missed phone call. The way she'd stumbled over her words at the grocery store. Everything felt like a tiny, humiliating failure.

She decided to scrub the kitchen floor. It needed it anyway.

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