self-critical - Story 127545 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The discovery sent a wave of nausea through Emily. Her daughter, Olivia, had a whole other life, a whole other *identity* online. It felt like a betrayal. Years spent trying, *trying*, to build a relationship, and for what?

Emily sank onto her bed, the floral comforter suddenly suffocating. She picked at the threads, her fingers trembling. Her reflection in the mirror was a stranger, the lines around her eyes more pronounced, the color drained from her face.

The room seemed to shrink, the walls closing in. She’d always been so careful, so dedicated. Now she felt like a fraud, a phony. The ache in her chest felt like a physical wound. She was a failure.

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