self-critical - Story 127854 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Mark traced his finger across the smudged ink of his father’s bucket list. "Learn to surf." He’d always felt a pressure to be like his father. He’d always failed.

"Build a treehouse for the grandkids." Mark’s eyes burned. He felt a familiar knot forming in his chest. His father had been a man of action, of adventure. Mark, in contrast, spent his days navigating the complexities of his small apartment.

He stared at the words, the casualness of it all. He stood up and starting pacing. Each word was a condemnation, each line a monument to his perceived shortcomings.

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