self-critical - Story 127557 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The weight of their disagreement settled into the apartment like a lead blanket. Sarah slammed the fridge door, the sound echoing through the sterile kitchen. Her roommate, Emily, wanted a guinea pig. *You always have to find the problem*.

Sarah was already imagining the constant cleaning, the hay everywhere, the potential for allergies. She felt a familiar tightness in her chest. She found herself cataloging the negatives, as she always did.

"I just… don’t think it’s fair to the animal," she said, her voice tight. Emily’s eyes narrowed. Sarah looked away, suddenly intensely interested in the chipped paint on the windowsill.

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