self-critical - Story 127605 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The discovery was a gut punch. A hidden trove of pictures in a trunk in the family barn. These pictures depicted her father in ways he’d never allowed her to see him.

The man in the photographs wasn’t the stoic, emotionally unavailable figure she knew. He was jovial, demonstrative, and surrounded by friends she'd never heard of. It was a person that he had apparently been hiding from her all these years.

Her jaw clenched as a sharp pain flared in her chest. She had always felt like she fell short in his eyes.

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