self-critical - Story 127463 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sunlight seemed too bright in the kitchen, illuminating every speck of dust on the mahogany table. Grandma's silver tea set, glinting under the glare, felt like a deliberate taunt. She’d been so negligent.

"I need the money," her sister, Emily, was saying. She'd always been the responsible one. Always reliable. Always… better.

Lily nodded, a lump forming in her throat. She hadn't offered to help, hadn't even thought to. She had been consumed by her own trivial concerns. Now, her family was suffering, and she could only stand here, useless, ashamed.

She gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white. The teapot, so exquisite, seemed to mock her. She felt a burning sensation in her chest, a familiar sting of inadequacy that rose with every word. She felt unworthy of the silverware, unworthy of the air she breathed.

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