self-critical - Story 127886 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He saw the new pool being installed next door. Michael. Always so quiet. Always so…ordinary, until he wasn't. Now, his backyard was a construction site, filled with the promise of endless summer days. Michael’s smile felt hollow.

He felt a sudden, sharp pang of regret for his own, barren backyard. His own financial constraints made him feel trapped. He wished he had the means to create something similar, something beautiful, something…desirable.

He avoided his neighbor's eyes at the next meeting, focusing instead on the dull sheen of his shoes. The weight of his own perceived inadequacy settled heavily on him, making even the simplest task, like making small talk, feel Herculean.

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