self-critical - Story 127687 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chessboard lay between them, the pieces gleaming under the overhead light. His daughter, Olivia, moved her queen with a practiced ease, her eyes narrowed in concentration. He used to be a formidable player. Now, he felt clumsy, hesitant. The familiar strategies, the intricate calculations, felt beyond his reach.

He shifted in his chair, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks. He made a hasty move, a blatant blunder. He could feel her surprise and slight disappointment. He had lost his composure. He felt he was starting again and could never learn this game, and that he would never be as good as his daughter, or her teacher.

“Checkmate,” she said, softly.

He nodded, avoiding her gaze, the weight of his defeat crushing.

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