self-critical - Story 127793 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sunlight streaming through the kitchen window highlighted the dust motes dancing in the air, mocking Chloe’s attempts at cleanliness. She’d spent the morning scrubbing, polishing, and reorganizing, but the house still felt… tainted. The detective’s call about the house's past, a gruesome stabbing, had settled in her stomach like a cold stone.

She had convinced herself that buying the house was a good decision. A fresh start. A chance to finally create the life she wanted. But now, all she could see were the flaws, the imperfections, the failures of her judgment. The detective's voice, devoid of empathy, echoed in her head.

Chloe pulled the curtains shut, plunging the kitchen into semi-darkness. She was perpetually disappointing herself. How could she ever feel safe, or happy, knowing that violence had once consumed this very space?

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