self-critical - Story 127374 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stalked through the house, his jaw tight, his shoulders hunched. The real estate agent's platitudes about "charm" and "potential" grated on his nerves. He saw only flaws, not charm. He had already found many issues with the plumbing, the wiring, the poor insulation. He saw these as a reflection of himself.

In the dusty attic, he stumbled upon an oddly placed section of wall. He poked at it, and it gave way with a groan, revealing a small, previously concealed room. The space was filled with old trunks, each seemingly heavier than the last, and they were filled with the possessions of the previous owners. Their lives were on display in front of him, and he could only see the accomplishments and the love. Their life appeared so much more fulfilled. He, on the other hand, felt a wave of inadequacy.

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