self-critical - Story 127808 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The genealogy website lit up, a confirmation of the inescapable truth. A half-sister. The data, the percentages, felt like an indictment of her life. She’d spent so many years trying to please her parents, to be the perfect daughter, and still, she had fallen short.

She spent the afternoon cleaning, a frenetic, almost violent energy taking over. She washed the floors, scrubbed the walls, rearranged the furniture. She found herself staring at her reflection in the mirror, searching for flaws, for the reasons why she wasn’t good enough.

She'd felt it all her life – the pressure, the constant feeling of lacking. The knowledge of her sibling only intensified that feeling, making her feel like a shadow of a person. She hated her father, she hated herself, she hated the life that had been forced on her.

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