self-critical - Story 127782 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Dust motes danced in the late afternoon sun as Daniel navigated the online listing. The pictures of his childhood home, updated and renovated, felt like a punch to the gut. The manicured lawn, the crisp lines of the new siding, everything was too perfect.

He closed his eyes, remembering the chipped paint, the overgrown rose bushes, and his father’s relentless criticisms of everything he ever did.

He'd spent years trying to live up to his father's expectations, and he had failed, again and again. The house, in its new state, was a glaring testament to what he wasn’t. He gripped his phone tightly, his knuckles white.

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