self-critical - Story 127407 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The musty scent of old books filled the air, the library was where Clara had always found solace. Now, inherited from her grandmother, it felt like a trial. Her brother, Owen, was jovial, already pulling books from the shelves. She lingered in the doorway.

Each book, each title, each author felt like a mountain of knowledge she couldn't climb. She felt her chest tighten with anxiety, her palms sweating. Her own intelligence always felt lacking.

She watched Owen examining a first edition, and felt a surge of envy, quickly followed by a feeling of disgust at her own perceived superficiality. She took a deep breath, and took a book at random, her fingers tracing the worn cover.

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