self-critical - Story 127394 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bookstore, normally a haven, now seemed to press in on him. Mark ran a hand through his hair, already feeling the familiar throb behind his temples. He was looking for a book on woodworking. As he flicked through a copy of “The Complete Woodworker,” a yellowed envelope tumbled out. Inside, a letter, dated decades ago. It was from a father to his son.

The letter spoke of pride in a finished project, a handcrafted rocking horse. Mark’s jaw clenched. He’d barely finished the simple birdhouse he'd started last summer. The father's words about patience and dedication struck a sour note. He tossed the letter on the counter, the crisp edges of the paper cutting against his palm.

He left the book on the counter as well, heading back into the harsh sunlight. He felt the weight of unspoken expectations and unfulfilled desires pressing down on him.

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