self-critical - Story 127467 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chipped porcelain doll, carefully preserved in a glass case, seemed to stare at her with an accusing gaze. "I need to sell it, honey," her mother had said, her voice tight. “It’s time.” She had already failed.

The doll, given to her by her grandmother, held a profound weight. She hadn’t kept in touch with her mother. She hadn’t been a good daughter. The doll’s fragile beauty was a sharp reminder of all she had ruined.

She clenched her jaw. She should have visited more, called more, *done* more. She had disappointed everyone.

She looked away, unable to bear the doll's silent judgment. The room suddenly felt very small, very cold. She felt alone.

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