self-critical - Story 127424 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Another one?” Sarah’s voice, brittle and tight, echoed in her empty apartment. She ripped open the envelope, her fingers clumsy and fumbling. Inside, glossy photos of smiling faces stared back at her. She felt her stomach clench. Twenty years. Had it really been that long? She had a fleeting thought of actually going, then immediately dismissed it. What was the point? To measure herself against their yardsticks? To expose her perceived shortcomings? No thanks.

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