self-critical - Story 127601 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The attic air hung thick with dust and the ghosts of forgotten summers. A small, brittle box sat tucked away in the deepest corner, its contents a mystery. Sarah, however, felt compelled to delve in, a familiar ache blooming in her chest as she approached.

She lifted the lid and, with trembling hands, pulled out a stack of photographs. The first showed her grandmother, a woman she'd always known as stern and unyielding, laughing with a man who was decidedly not her grandfather. A sharp stab of unease ran through Sarah.

A knot formed in her stomach as she continued to flip through the images. Her grandmother, in the stories told, had been a paragon of virtue. Yet, here she was, in a sun-drenched photograph, caught in a moment of undeniable joy with a man who wasn't the man she married. Why did the truth always feel so hard to face?

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