self-critical - Story 127397 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The used bookstore smelled of aging paper and forgotten stories. Clara browsed the shelves, seeking solace. She selected a collection of short stories, hoping to lose herself in the narratives of others. A small, handwritten note tumbled out as she opened the book.

The letter was a passionate apology. The writer begged for forgiveness, detailing mistakes, and promising change. Clara felt a jolt of discomfort. The sincerity of the words felt like a direct confrontation. She had made so many mistakes.

She'd thought she was doing better, but the words echoed in her ears. Each carefully chosen phrase was a whisper of her own failures. She closed the book, the words still ringing in her head. She set the book back on the shelf.

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