self-critical - Story 127560 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The apartment felt small, the walls closing in. Tom scrubbed at a non-existent stain on the counter. His roommate, Alex, wanted a bearded dragon. He knew he was being difficult. *You’re impossible*. The thought, familiar and unwelcome, flashed through his mind.

He already imagined the insects, the heat lamp, the specialized care required. He felt the familiar weight of responsibility. He felt the familiar surge of resistance.

He finally said, "I just think we should think about it more." He flinched, anticipating Alex’s frustration. He felt a familiar knot of shame tighten in his chest.

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