self-critical - Story 127606 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The attic felt cold, despite the summer heat. Thomas felt the familiar burn of anxiety in his gut as he lifted the heavy box. He was always worried about doing the right thing, trying to avoid any problems.

Inside, he found a photo album filled with pictures of his grandfather. This man he knew as a pillar of the community, a saint. But the photographs told a different story. They showed a life full of secrets.

A wave of nausea washed over Thomas. Why had he always been so focused on upholding the family image? The pressure was too much.

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