self-critical - Story 127770 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The photograph in her hand seemed to mock her. A smiling child, beaming proudly next to a tiny sapling. A fool, she thought, the picture feeling too heavy in her grasp. Now, a cold, hard stump. The evidence of another failure.

She ran her fingers across the wood. Even nature, she realised, couldn't be trusted to grow. The tree represented everything she couldn't achieve. She had thought, for a fleeting moment, she could.

Her shoulders slumped. She tossed the photograph onto the ground and walked away, the wind whistling a lonely song.

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