self-critical - Story 127570 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Sarah's stomach churned as she pulled up to the venue for her party. Her friend, Hannah, was hosting a sophisticated dinner party at a Michelin-star restaurant. Sarah, on the other hand, was having a casual barbecue in her backyard.

She had spent days planning, but now, doubt gnawed at her. She felt like an imposter. Why didn't she have a nicer house? Why wasn’t she more sophisticated?

She fiddled with her hair, feeling the harsh scrutiny of her thoughts. The table setting was all wrong. The music was terrible. Everything was wrong.

She took a deep breath and forced a smile as she greeted her first guest. The words felt like sandpaper in her mouth. She could feel her face flush. It was all going to be awful.

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