self-critical - Story 127748 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The branches, thick as the trunks of younger trees, lay across the perfectly manicured lawn, a testament to the storm. Her neighbor, Mr. Harrison, stood by his house, his face a mask of controlled fury. *He probably thinks you let it happen. That you didn't warn him,* a thought that burned. She'd seen the way the trunk was leaning. She knew. She hadn't said anything. Now, the quiet scrutiny of his gaze felt like a physical blow. She stayed rooted to her porch, unable to move, feeling the familiar sting of her own supposed shortcomings.

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