self-critical - Story 127659 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Her heart hammered against her ribs. Olivia had been trying to be helpful, sending instructions to a friend. Instead, the message had gone to a complete stranger. She felt her face burn with shame.

She felt a wave of anger wash over her, followed by a deeper sense of self-loathing. She could never do anything right. Her mind spun, replaying the scenario, magnifying every perceived flaw.

She retreated to her room, the door clicking shut like the sound of a final judgment. She crawled under her blankets, the darkness offering a false sense of comfort, and the world spun.

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