self-critical - Story 127404 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The scent of lemon polish and mothballs assaulted Ava’s senses, and she wrinkled her nose. Her sister, Clara, was already busy, dusting a porcelain doll collection, her movements efficient and graceful. Ava felt a fresh surge of insecurity.

She attempted to help, but her efforts felt futile. She accidentally knocked over a small vase, the shattering sound a deafening condemnation. Clara sighed, a small, barely perceptible sound, but it was enough to make Ava's cheeks burn.

She mumbled an apology and retreated to the kitchen, feeling a familiar tightness in her chest. She needed to be useful, needed to not mess up. She looked at the cluttered counters and immediately began, wiping them down with unnecessary vigor, hoping to atone for her blunder.

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