self-critical - Story 127603 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sunlight sliced through the dusty windows of the storage room, illuminating floating motes. Amelia rummaged through a box overflowing with relics from her childhood, searching for a specific toy. Instead, she unearthed a collection of photographs, yellowed at the edges.

She gasped as she recognized her mother, a woman who always painted herself as the victim of circumstance, embracing a glamorous life she’d never mentioned. A vibrant cocktail party, a smile she never remembered seeing, a complete stranger laughing at a joke.

Amelia’s face flushed hot, and her hands began to shake as she saw the woman who had caused her so much pain. Suddenly, her own efforts, the sacrifices she made to honor her mother, felt pointless.

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