self-critical - Story 127455 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The DNA results landed in Maya’s inbox like a bomb. She had always prided herself on her independence, her ability to stand alone. Now, the news of her adoption felt like a validation of that isolation. It felt like she had been expecting it. Her hands began to tremble. Her parents had been loving, always supportive. She pictured them now, their smiles, their kindness. Was that all an act? She found herself avoiding their calls, unable to face the potential betrayal. She started tearing the house apart, searching for any hidden clues, any shred of evidence she could use to support her assumptions. Everything felt tainted.

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