self-critical - Story 127766 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“It’s gone,” he muttered to the empty house. The oak, which he'd named 'Hope,' now existed only as a memory. A stark reminder. He felt the familiar sting behind his eyes, a tightness in his throat. He should have known.

He sat on the porch, staring at the vacant space. His brother had always been the one who could grow things. He could fix things. He was successful. While he failed, as he always did.

He ran a hand through his hair. Everything he ever touched turned to dust.

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