self-critical - Story 127413 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The leather was soft and luxurious, a stark contrast to the grit under Liam's fingernails. He found it tucked behind a dumpster, a forgotten treasure in a sea of refuse. *What would YOU do with it, Liam? Splurge on some cheap thrills? Some useless trinkets?* The thought, a familiar companion, landed like a blow. He knew the money was enough to pay his rent and buy groceries. He’d been struggling lately, working two jobs just to get by.

He closed his eyes for a moment, the scent of the nearby pizza shop mixing with the acrid smell of the trash. He needed to find the owner, he told himself. But the argument was already raging inside him. He started feeling lightheaded and his pulse started to quicken.

He knew what he should do. He knew what he *would* do, in an ideal world. But this world wasn't ideal. Not for him. He imagined himself, his name in the news, lauded as a hero. He hated how that thought made him feel.

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