self-critical - Story 127765 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The empty space where the willow used to stand felt vast and unforgiving. Sarah took a deep breath, trying to calm the tremor in her hands. She had been so sure she could nurture it. That she could be capable of bringing something to fruition.

She had pictured the weeping branches, the gentle sway in the wind. A sanctuary. Instead, a void. Every other endeavor in her life felt like this now. Short lived. Insignificant.

She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them, the world seeming brighter, yet more desolate. She wanted to scream.

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