self-critical - Story 127466 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"The painting needs to go," her sister, Carol, stated, her voice brisk and practical. She was always efficient, always in control. Sarah felt a flush creep up her neck. She was always the one who messed up.

The landscape, painted by their grandmother, hung on the wall. Its soft colors felt like a judgment of her own harshness. Sarah was always a let-down.

She shifted uncomfortably, avoiding Carol's gaze. She had forgotten birthdays, missed phone calls. She had never been dependable.

She should have offered to buy it, but the words caught in her throat. Her gaze drifted toward the painting, the rolling hills and serene skies. She was unworthy of the beauty.

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