self-critical - Story 127410 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The old house felt like a labyrinth, each room a reminder of past decisions. Sam felt his heart race as he entered the dark hallway. His sister, Emily, was already in the kitchen, making tea. He lagged behind, his footsteps hesitant.

He wanted to be helpful, to be useful. He felt a constant need to prove his worth, to justify his existence. He found himself picking at a loose thread on the carpet, lost in thoughts of his shortcomings.

He joined Emily in the kitchen, but didn’t speak. The scent of chamomile hung in the air. He poured himself a glass of water, his hand shaking slightly. He’d never measure up, he thought. He knew it.

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