self-critical - Story 127729 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The house, once filled with laughter, now echoed with emptiness. Amelia, sorting through her grandmother's belongings, felt the weight of her own imperfections.

She found a letter tucked away in a sewing box. Her grandmother, the woman who had always seemed so strong, had written a draft resignation letter. Amelia knew the job had been her life.

She felt the now familiar tightness in her chest. She had a list of failings that was too long. She hated how she was. She could not possibly measure up to her.

She rose, pacing the room, a frenzied energy coursing through her. She needed to be busy, to distract herself. She grabbed a sponge and began scrubbing the kitchen floor, a mindless activity to numb the pain of her inadequacies.

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