self-critical - Story 127551 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The tiny kitchen felt suffocating, even with the window cracked. Rain lashed against the pane, mirroring the tempest inside Amelia. Liam was adamant about a cat; she was just as resolute against it. Now, his gentle persistence felt more like a pointed accusation. *You’re so rigid, Amelia*. She heard the voice in her head, the one that usually accompanied a tightening in her chest.

Amelia scrubbed at the already spotless counter, the harsh scent of bleach stinging her nostrils. Liam had suggested a ginger tabby, a playful, low-maintenance creature, but the thought of it – the shedding, the potential for messes – sent a fresh wave of unease crashing over her.

She met Liam’s hopeful gaze and found herself deflecting with a sharp laugh. "Honestly, Liam, with my schedule? It's just not practical." He flinched, and guilt, sharp and familiar, pierced her. She bit her lip, the taste of metal suddenly prominent.

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