self-critical - Story 127833 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The envelope felt almost radioactive. Inside, a statement from a credit union he’d never heard of. His wife, Sarah, had $18,000 stashed away. It was a betrayal, a confirmation of his suspicions that he wasn't enough. He’d always felt like a burden.

He pictured her, vibrant and full of life, at their anniversary dinner last week. He'd been worried about the bill. He hadn't bought her a proper gift. He looked at the chipped paint on the wall, the worn carpet. He was a failure.

He slumped onto the sofa, the statement a hot weight in his hand. He was sure she would be better off without 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