self-critical - Story 127876 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He saw the billboard on the highway, his photography blown up to an enormous scale. The image, a landscape he'd poured his heart into, seemed flat, lifeless, distorted by the massive size. The details he’d painstakingly crafted were lost. It was like seeing a magnified version of his own flaws.

His hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel. He wanted to stop the car, tear down the billboard, and run as far away as possible. The wind whistled through the gap in the window, but the air felt thick and heavy in his lungs.

The other drivers honked, the glare of their headlights reflecting in his eyes. He sped up.

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