self-critical - Story 127556 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The cramped hallway felt like a pressure cooker. The air hung thick with the unresolved argument. Michael leaned against the wall, trying to appear nonchalant while his roommate, Ethan, was going on about wanting a reptile, specifically a chameleon. *You're so afraid of everything*.

He pictured the terrarium, the crickets, the potential for the creature to escape. His heart raced. He’d always been the one who wanted everything settled, predictable. He found himself cataloging all the things that could go wrong.

“It just sounds like a lot of work, Ethan," he said, his voice unusually high. He knew he was being overly cautious. He hated the way his voice sounded. He was sure Ethan would see right through him.

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