self-critical - Story 127383 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The restaurant was too bright, the music too loud, the laughter too boisterous. Amelia shifted uncomfortably in her chair, fiddling with the straw in her cocktail. Across the table, Mark was enthusiastically describing a surprise picnic he had planned, complete with a gourmet cheese board and a bottle of her "favorite" wine.

Her favorite wine, he’d said. She hadn’t told him her favorite wine. Or rather, she thought she hadn't. Had she? Maybe she had, but she just wasn’t remembering, because she couldn’t keep a conversation straight.

Panic threatened to overwhelm her. He was mentioning things she had been talking about with David, things about him that she thought she knew, and she didn’t. The wine she'd thought he remembered was actually the brand that "Jennifer" liked. The other woman, apparently, also loved picnics. The ground seemed to open up beneath her, and she suddenly wished she could disappear.

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