self-critical - Story 127607 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The old trunk, hidden away in the basement, revealed a treasure trove of forgotten memories. Laura, plagued by a sense of inadequacy, felt her heart sink as she began to sift through the contents.

Amongst the faded photographs, she found pictures of her Aunt Helen, the woman who had always been held up as an example. The woman's exploits were nothing like the tales she'd been told.

Laura felt a familiar sense of worthlessness creep in. It was a sense she always had. She felt a need to please, the pressure to conform, the feeling that she never measured up.

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