self-critical - Story 127457 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news felt like a physical blow. Emily crumpled to the floor, her breath catching in her throat. She had always been plagued by a sense of not belonging, a feeling that she was constantly making mistakes. This felt like proof. She pictured her childhood home, the carefully curated decorations, the family traditions. Was it all a sham? She got up and walked around her house, meticulously straightening everything. She cleaned, she scrubbed, she organized. Every imperfection seemed to stand out, every flaw magnified. She felt an overwhelming need to be perfect, to erase any sign of error.

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