self-critical - Story 127469 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The old pocket watch, passed down through generations, lay on the table, reflecting the dim light of the room. "I'm going to have to sell it," his uncle, Michael, said, his voice quiet, his eyes averted. He was a constant disappointment.

He should have been more involved, should have been there to help. His absence was a heavy stone.

He fidgeted with the edge of the tablecloth, feeling a familiar tightness in his chest. He was always falling short. He was letting everyone down.

He hated himself. He looked at the watch, its delicate details now a stark reminder of all the chances he had wasted.

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