self-critical - Story 127790 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The real estate listing for his childhood home had become an obsession for David. Every picture, every detail, filled him with a potent mix of nostalgia and frustration. The house was now perfect, reflecting a life he hadn’t had, a success he hadn’t achieved.

He’d always felt like an outsider, an observer. He scrolled through the photos again, feeling the familiar sting of envy and self-reproach.

He sat back in his chair, a sigh escaping his lips. He was stuck, forever haunted by the ghosts of his past and the constant shadow of his own perceived failings.

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