self-critical - Story 127558 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The scent of stale coffee hung heavy in the air. John stared out the window, avoiding his roommate, Kevin's gaze. Kevin had proposed adopting a kitten. *You're such a killjoy*. The thought felt like a physical blow.

John pictured the fur on the furniture, the late-night meows, the inevitable vet bills. His stomach churned. He found himself preparing an argument against the idea, anticipating Kevin’s counterpoints.

He said, "It's just not the right time, Kevin." He knew the words sounded hollow. He hated how he sounded. He hated how predictable he was.

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