self-critical - Story 127809 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He had seen the paperwork, the blood test results, the name – “Ethan.” A half-brother. The news was a physical blow, leaving him winded, his breath caught in his throat. He had spent his life striving to be worthy. Worthy of his parents' love, worthy of respect, worthy of a successful career. And now, this.

He started exercising, pushing himself harder than ever, as if physical exertion could somehow erase the internal turmoil. He ran until his lungs burned, lifted weights until his muscles screamed. He was still not worthy.

He thought of Ethan, the other son, the other boy. He was certain that Ethan was everything he was not: Easygoing, successful, beloved. He felt the familiar weight of disappointment settle on him, crushing him.

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