self-critical - Story 127774 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The lawyer finished the details, and the reality of the situation sunk in, and John’s face fell. He glanced at his sister, Emma, who was beaming with delight. She had been granted the family’s oceanfront property, a sprawling beach house with views that stretched for miles.

John, however, received the family’s vast collection of debts, a mountain of financial burdens that he would have to spend years dealing with. He knew he wasn't as responsible as Emma, or as naturally gifted.

He swallowed hard, forcing a smile. Emma was already discussing renovation plans, her eyes sparkling with excitement. He felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, the salty air suddenly feeling heavy, suffocating. He wondered how he would ever manage to escape his perceived failings. The taste of salt water clung to his tongue, a bitter reminder.

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