self-critical - Story 127385 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The flickering candlelight cast dancing shadows on the walls of the Italian restaurant. Across the table, Daniel leaned in, his eyes shining with a familiar charm. He was describing his "perfect" Sunday afternoon, a description that sounded eerily familiar to her.

Her breath hitched. The movie, the restaurant, even the little Italian place, had all been the same, same as the one he'd described to Melissa. He was saying all the things, using her name, but she was starting to feel like a fraud.

A wave of nausea washed over her. She picked at the ravioli on her plate, the food suddenly tasteless. Why couldn't she be more interesting? Why couldn't she make someone happy?

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