self-critical - Story 127888 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The new yacht was the final straw. John had always considered his modest boat a source of pride. Now, seeing Mr. Harrison’s colossal vessel glisten in the harbor, he felt a wave of bitterness. It was an extravagant display of wealth that highlighted John's own limitations.

He gritted his teeth, clenching his jaw as he headed to the harbor. His boat looked small, almost embarrassed. He imagined the lavish parties, the exotic vacations… and he imagined his own routine of endless worry.

He spent the afternoon polishing his own boat, the task becoming a futile exercise in self-soothing. The salt spray couldn’t wash away the feeling of being…left behind.

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