self-critical - Story 127616 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Eliza meticulously straightened the tablecloth, a nervous habit she employed when overwhelmed. The vibrant colors of the decorations seemed to scream at her, a constant reminder of the happiness she didn't feel. This was supposed to be a joyous occasion, but she felt trapped.

She replayed every mistake she had made in the past. Every argument with her parents, every broken promise, every disappointment. She was sure she would mess up the speech, and everyone would finally see what she thought about herself.

When she finally stood, her knees felt like jelly. Her voice was flat and she rushed through the words, just wanting to be done with it.

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