self-critical - Story 127887 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The vibrant colors of the artist's garden next door felt like a slap in the face. Eleanor had always prided herself on her own small flower garden. Now, hers looked pathetic, a weak imitation of beauty. She knew her own garden wasn't terrible, but it didn't have the grand, effortless appeal.

Her stomach churned. She picked at the chipped paint on her own front door. She felt the urge to apologize for her existence, for her own lack of success.

She retreated inside, pulling the blinds shut. The sun, which had been so inviting, now seemed to mock her. She wished she felt content, but she just felt… small.

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