self-critical - Story 127504 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He crouched low, his shoulders hunched. The tiny, wire-haired terrier, Max, was at it again, weaving through the gaps of his chain-link fence. His heart pounded in his chest. He took the blame. He had failed the simple task of securing his yard. He couldn’t even do that right.

He should have chosen a more robust option. He should have paid closer attention to the dog's escape routes. The air felt thick, the weight of his incompetence pressing on him. He just couldn't seem to get anything right.

He watched Max trot toward the overflowing trash can. He imagined the mess, the annoyance of having to clean it up. He was already dreading the inevitable confrontation with his wife, the unspoken disappointment in her eyes.

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