self-critical - Story 127885 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Honestly, the audacity," Martha muttered, watching Mrs. Abernathy unload a shopping cart overflowing with designer groceries. Martha's own basket contained only the bare necessities. She felt a burning sensation in her chest.

She went to pick up her own shopping, and found herself making comparisons. Her old, faded coat, in contrast to Mrs. Abernathy’s cashmere one. The way Mrs. Abernathy moved, with a casual elegance Martha felt she couldn’t match.

Back at her apartment, the scent of the neighbor's fancy meal wafted through the shared vent. Martha slammed the door, her reflection showing a face she didn’t quite recognize. She was sick of not being enough. She was tired of feeling like she was missing out.

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