self-critical - Story 127780 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The grand library, filled with the scent of aged paper and leather, felt suffocating. Her brother, Ethan, was already planning on taking over the family's world-renowned university. Sarah, on the other hand, felt a wave of dread wash over her.

“Ethan receives the university,” the executor intoned. Ethan nodded, his voice steady and calm. Sarah felt a tremor run through her.

“Sarah,” the executor continued, “receives a collection of the family’s unfinished manuscripts and a small, struggling bookstore.” Her chest tightened. She pictured herself, the embodiment of a failure.

Ethan was already discussing the next phase with the lawyer. Sarah’s hands were clammy. The manuscripts felt like a burden, and the bookstore a symbol of her shortcomings. The scent of the leather-bound books felt like judgment.

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