self-critical - Story 127443 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The familiar scent of vanilla and ink hit him as he entered the room. He felt a wave of nausea. He saw the journal, opened to a page filled with his most vulnerable anxieties. He felt a deep sense of wrongness, like a dirty secret had been exposed. He hated himself for how much he cared about what others thought.

He glanced at the trash can, filled with crumpled sheets of paper. He really should throw it out, he thought.

His roommate, Alex, was sprawled on his bed, earbuds in. "Yo, what's up, man?" Alex asked, without removing the buds.

"Nothing," he mumbled, his throat tight. He moved towards his own bed, wanting to vanish.

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