self-critical - Story 127638 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The letter was found tucked inside a cookbook, a recipe for perfect cookies - which she'd never mastered. It was written to her mother, a litany of complaints about her life and her shortcomings.

A bitter smile touched her lips as she read it. It was a testament to her unending dissatisfaction with herself. She looked at her reflection in the darkened window.

She slammed the cookbook shut. How could she have been so selfish, so blind to her own good fortune? The letter felt like a slap in the face. She wanted to yell at the young woman who wrote 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