self-critical - Story 127633 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The scent of lavender wafted from the old stationery as Eleanor carefully opened the envelope. She was supposed to be relaxing, enjoying her afternoon tea, but her mind wouldn't settle. The letter was addressed to her sister, a plea for understanding from her college years. It revealed a deep insecurity about her talents, a constant feeling of being overshadowed.

She grimaced, her fingers twisting the delicate paper. She’d always been the quiet one, the one who doubted her abilities. She looked around her, at the beautiful home she had built, and felt a profound sense of wrongness. Nothing was ever good enough.

Setting the letter aside, she poured another cup of tea, the clinking of the china a stark counterpoint to the turmoil brewing within her. She closed her eyes for a moment, and saw only a child who still needed comfort.

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