self-critical - Story 127386 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air in the concert hall was thick with anticipation. David watched as Michael raved about the band. He had loved them, he insisted, for ages. David's own interest in the band was only a recent phenomenon, cultivated to connect with Michael.

He found himself nodding along, mirroring Michael’s enthusiasm. The words felt hollow, like a bad imitation. He'd even bought the same limited-edition t-shirt as the woman Michael was on the phone with right now, the one he had mentioned going to a concert with last week. The one named... Stephanie.

A sudden chill ran down his spine. Why did he not remember things? Why couldn't he be real?

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