self-critical - Story 127422 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

She smoothed down her worn jeans, a familiar gesture of doubt. The invitation, tucked discreetly between the pages of her well-loved cookbook, seemed to vibrate with unspoken judgment. A wave of heat washed over her face as she remembered the prom queen, the valedictorian, the effortlessly popular. Now, twenty years later, she was just… her. The thought sent her knuckles whitening as she gripped the counter. What would she even say? The truth?

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