self-critical - Story 127785 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Charming Colonial, Move-In Ready!" The words, printed in a jaunty font on the listing, felt like a slap in the face to Clara. She'd been a child in that house, and she'd been anything but ready.

The immaculate landscaping, the designer furniture – it all screamed of a life she'd never had. A life she wasn't good enough to have. She hadn't even managed to keep her own apartment tidy.

She swallowed hard, the lump in her throat making it difficult to breathe. She picked up a cup of tea, and then thought better of it, not wanting to risk spilling any of it.

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