self-critical - Story 127832 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the numbers. $23,000. Under *her* name. He'd been meticulously budgeting, cutting corners, feeling the pressure of their shared mortgage. Meanwhile, she’d… what? Hidden money? He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture he hadn't realized he made so often.

He sat at the kitchen table, the silence amplifying the thudding in his chest. He saw the empty coffee mugs, the smear of peanut butter on the counter. His attempt at a healthy breakfast was evident. He knew he should have been more responsible, been more of a provider. He felt the familiar weight of disappointment.

“I’m such a fool,” he mumbled to himself.

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