self-critical - Story 127486 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“You alright, sis?” her brother asked. Liam placed a hand on his sister's shoulder, and she flinched. The house was already mostly rubble.

"Yeah," she managed, her voice thin. She felt a profound sense of wrongness, as though she'd committed some great crime. She should have convinced her parents to hold onto the house, it should have been her responsibility.

Her shoulders slumped. She'd always been the one who talked a big game, promising to care for them when they got old. Now, the only thing she could care for was the ache in her chest. She needed to be more, to do more, but here she was: failing.

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