self-critical - Story 127547 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The secret account was a punch to the gut. Beth's daughter, Lila, had created a whole online world that Beth was completely unaware of. The account was filled with photos of parties, friends, and a version of Lila that seemed so vibrant and free.

Beth slammed the laptop shut, the sound sharp in the quiet kitchen. She walked to the window, staring out at the rain-soaked garden. The vibrant green seemed to mock her. Everything felt like a blur.

She sank into a kitchen chair, her shoulders slumped. The air felt heavy, and it was hard to breathe. The feeling of being 'found out' was crushing. She was just a boring, out-of-touch mom.

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