self-critical - Story 127602 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He’d always considered himself the product of hard work and unwavering resolve, just like his father. Yet, here was a picture. He found it in a dusty photo album he’d thought he’d looked at countless times before. But there it was - a photograph of his father, in a disreputable bar, arm draped around a woman he'd never seen before.

His shoulders slumped as he continued to stare, the image burned into his mind. Why had his father hidden this? Why had he built up such a rigid framework for him to follow? He'd always tried to live up to the image of perfection, of an ideal man.

The weight in his chest grew heavier with each image, a relentless pressure.

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