self-critical - Story 127761 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The saw's teeth were still fresh, the air thick with the scent of sawdust and broken promises. Amelia stared, hands clenching into fists at her sides. It was just a tree, a sapling really, she’d stuck in the ground when she was seven. Now, a stump. An ugly, raw wound in the perfect green of the park. *Of course*, she thought, the voice inside her a low, relentless drone. *You couldn't even keep a tree alive.*

She remembered the endless watering, the frantic worry during droughts, the childish hope. All for this. She took a step closer, feeling a sharp pang in her chest. Everything she tried, every effort…always a failure.

A squirrel darted across the new space, oblivious. Amelia scoffed, a tight, humorless sound. Even the squirrels were doing better than her, existing without the constant weight of inadequacy.

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