self-critical - Story 127550 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

David discovered the account while searching for a work document on his daughter's computer. The discovery struck him like a blow to the chest. He felt like he'd failed.

He sat back in the chair, staring at the screen. The carefully constructed persona felt like a slap in the face. He felt like an outsider in his own family. He felt alone.

He got up and went to the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face. He looked at his reflection, seeing the lines etched on his face, the weariness in his eyes. He felt a sense of profound sadness.

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