self-critical - Story 127435 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The café buzzed with conversation. John, hunched over his coffee, watched the customers happily devouring the "Hazelnut Heaven," a pastry almost identical to his father’s, “Poppy’s Perfect Pasteis.” John’s own bakery was struggling.

He took a large gulp of the bitter coffee, trying to quell the flutter in his chest. A photograph of his father, beaming, hung on his wall back home. John's father’s face filled with disappointment in his mind. He never could get things right. He felt an intense urge to disappear.

He closed his eyes for a moment, the caffeine doing little to ease the feeling of inadequacy that always seemed to follow 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