self-critical - Story 127405 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The house loomed, a silent observer. Daniel felt its weight, the burden of inheritance. His brother, Finn, strode forward, seemingly unfazed. Daniel kept to the edge of the overgrown lawn.

"It needs a lot of work," Finn stated matter-of-factly. Daniel agreed, but the observation didn't satisfy him. He longed to be more capable, more practical.

The neglected garden echoed his own perceived shortcomings, the weeds a symbol of his perceived failures. He clenched his fists, feeling the familiar sting of resentment towards his own perceived weakness. He knew Finn would manage everything, and he would only be a hindrance. He should have known more. He should have done more.

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