self-critical - Story 127408 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The creaking of the floorboards echoed through the silent house. Noah felt the weight of his grandmother's absence, a weight that amplified his own insecurities. His sister, Olivia, hummed a tuneless song, seemingly at peace. He felt his jaw clench.

He ran his hand over the dusty surface of a table. He wanted to restore it, to make everything new again. But he felt paralyzed by the magnitude of the task. He felt his incompetence, the weight of his perceived inadequacies.

He walked into the dining room. The sight of the half-finished renovations by his grandmother, was, to him, a testament to her failures. He needed to be perfect, to succeed where she had, and the thought made him feel sick.

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