self-critical - Story 127431 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The newspaper crinkled in Amelia’s hands as she scanned the food section. A smile tugged at her lips. Then, she read the review of "Aunt Millie's Amazing Apple Crumble." Her smile faltered. The article raved about its perfectly spiced filling and crumbly topping. Amelia's stomach clenched. She'd been using her great-grandmother's recipe for apple crumble for years, calling it "Granny's Goodness."

A wave of heat rose to her face. She smoothed the paper, her fingertips tracing the bold headline. Aunt Millie’s was her own secret family recipe. She had shared it once with a friend, Millie, years ago, and thought nothing of it. Now, it was famous, under a different name, and Millie's bake shop was thriving.

Amelia slammed the paper down on the table, the sound echoing in the otherwise quiet kitchen. She ran a hand through her already messy hair, feeling a familiar tightness in her chest. Everything she did felt wrong, somehow. She felt like a failure.

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