self-critical - Story 127369 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The moment she saw the card, her breath hitched. It was a generic illustration of flowers, and its generic message felt deeply personal. *Hope your day is special!* She’d spent the entire morning consumed by a sense of inadequacy. She was certain that she had displeased her boss and hadn’t called her best friend in days.

She went inside, leaving the card untouched. She felt a burning sensation in her chest, a constant, nagging disapproval. She looked around her apartment, seeing only the things that she hadn’t fixed, the tasks she hadn’t completed. She sat down at her desk, feeling trapped.

The silence was deafening.

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