self-critical - Story 127468 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The worn leather armchair, her father's favorite, sat in the corner of the living room, a tangible embodiment of his life. "It's just… taking up space," her sister, Jessica, had said, her tone devoid of emotion. He was letting his father down.

He clenched his fists, struggling to find his voice. He had been away so long, hadn’t helped enough, and his absence was a constant, searing pain. He was unfeeling.

He should have been here, should have helped. He should have taken care of it. The emptiness in the room felt like a reflection of the hollowness inside him.

He looked down at his hands, feeling the familiar sting of his inadequacies. He was useless.

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