self-critical - Story 127810 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The text message, innocuous and simple, arrived on a Saturday: "Hey, I'm your sister." It was accompanied by a photo of a woman she’d never met. Sarah stared at the picture, the face unfamiliar, but the eyes felt strangely familiar. They were her father's eyes.

She pulled the curtains shut, plunging the living room into darkness. She felt the old, familiar shame creep over her. The years of feeling like she was never quite good enough for her parents came flooding back.

She felt like she was a disappointment, not worthy of family. She grabbed a bottle of wine from the fridge, downing half the contents in quick, desperate gulps. She had a sudden, overwhelming urge to break something, to shatter the silence.

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