self-critical - Story 127368 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bright, colorful card seemed to vibrate with a false cheer. *Celebrate!* it proclaimed. He closed the door of the mailbox and leaned against it, the weight of the day suddenly crushing him. He'd been trying to be positive, to be optimistic, to be *someone* that people wanted to be around.

He walked back inside, noticing the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. He saw flaws everywhere. Every scuff mark on the floor, every crack in the wall, every smudge on the window. He grabbed a cleaning cloth and started to meticulously wipe down the kitchen cabinets.

He was exhausted.

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