self-critical - Story 127787 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The house, framed in the realtor’s perfect photographs, held a dark allure for Sarah. She knew she shouldn’t, yet she kept re-visiting the listing, each time feeling more inadequate. The memories were vivid: her parents’ constant disapproval, the way she could never please them.

She hated the new owners for making such a pretty house. She hated the pristine paint job, the lush green lawn, the implication of a happy, functional family. She hated how much it reminded her of her own failures.

She gripped her phone, her fingers digging into the cold metal. This was a familiar ache, an old familiar emptiness.

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