self-critical - Story 127484 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The car radio blasted the morning news, but Maya could only hear the hammering. It was a rhythmic pulse of destruction. She’d promised her siblings she’d be here, but she’d almost turned around at the last minute. Every inch of her wanted to flee.

She had neglected the house, she knew. She’d made excuses, prioritised work, and ignored her mother’s pleas to help. Now, the walls were tumbling, the memories being buried.

Her mouth felt dry, her heart rate quickened. She should have been stronger, more resilient. A better protector of the family’s legacy. Each fallen beam was another mark against her.

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