self-critical - Story 127421 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The embossed invitation felt heavy in Elias’s hand, a physical manifestation of the weight he carried. He tossed it onto the overflowing pile of bills on his kitchen table, the elegant script mocking the chaotic state of his life. His reflection in the darkened window showed a man years older than his actual age, lines etched around his eyes deepening as he sighed. The reunion. He imagined the success stories, the perfect families, the careers that had taken flight. He'd stayed put. He'd done the safe thing. And where had it gotten him?

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