self-critical - Story 127548 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

John found his son, Alex’s, account late at night. The pictures revealed a life of his son that was completely hidden from him. He felt betrayed. He felt useless.

He went to the living room window, pulling back the curtains. The neighborhood was quiet, still. The silence felt heavy. He ran his hand through his hair, a nervous gesture.

His stomach churned. He’d dedicated his life to giving Alex the best, and this was the thanks he got? The unfairness of it all overwhelmed him. He felt a profound sense of disappointment and inadequacy.

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