self-critical - Story 127474 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The package arrived on a Tuesday, the day after Liam had spectacularly failed to impress his boss. Addressed to "Mrs. Iris Bloom," it felt like another weight added to his already burdened shoulders. The previous tenant, a woman he knew nothing about, but already imagined as polished and graceful.

He glanced at the overflowing sink, the pile of unwashed dishes from the evening before. He could feel his face flush, a response to a constant awareness of not being good enough. This feeling seemed to follow him.

The package contained a collection of watercolor paints and brushes. Liam, whose artistic endeavors were limited to stick figures, felt a fresh wave of inadequacy wash over him. He imagined Mrs. Bloom, effortlessly creating beautiful landscapes. He wanted to be better, to be more. He wanted more from himself. He felt the familiar weight pressing down on him.

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