self-critical - Story 127788 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bright sunlight streaming through the windows of her rented apartment felt mocking as Eliza looked at the listing. Her childhood home, transformed and perfect, was now a symbol of her failures. She was the one who could never keep anything tidy, who couldn't even keep a plant alive.

The words "Exceptional Opportunity" on the listing felt like a personal insult. She had squandered her own opportunities. Now, someone else got to live in *her* home, in a state she would never achieve.

She felt a wave of despair wash over her, cold and heavy. She closed her eyes, imagining the faces of her parents.

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