self-critical - Story 127365 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

*Happy Birthday!* The card's cheerful message seemed to mock her. She’d spent the entire morning battling a knot of anxiety in her stomach, scrutinizing every action, every word. Was she being too loud? Too quiet? Too… something?

She read the card again, looking for clues, for some indication of who sent it. She found none. She started to fidget, picking at a loose thread on her sweater. She felt adrift, like she was constantly disappointing someone, even if she couldn't pinpoint who.

She ran a hand through her hair, and then slumped onto the sofa.

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