self-critical - Story 127473 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The doorbell rang, a sharp, unwelcome sound. Sarah, already bracing herself for another disappointment, answered to find a delivery person holding a large, ornate box. "For Mr. Theodore Finch," he announced, confirming her apprehension. Theodore Finch had been the previous tenant, and now this was her.

She took the box inside, the intricate wrapping paper mocking her. Her own life felt so…ordinary. The box felt like a tangible representation of her inadequacies. A constant feeling gnawed at her, a constant whisper of "not enough."

Inside, nestled in layers of tissue paper, was a silver tea set. Perfect, gleaming. Sarah’s kitchen was filled with mismatched mugs and chipped plates, a reflection of her own perceived imperfections. She ran a hand through her hair, a gesture meant to hide her face from the judgements she placed on herself. This box, a symbol of elegance, made her feel small.

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