self-critical - Story 127912 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The phone felt heavy in her hand. It always did when she was about to face conflict. Her neighbor, Mrs. Gable, wanted to talk about the oak. “It's dropping leaves all over my pool, dear,” her voice, sharp as a shard of glass, had said the day before. Now, staring at the screen, a hot, prickly feeling crept up her neck. She’d known this was coming. It was always *her* fault. She was never good enough. The tree, she reminded herself, *was* a mess. She hadn't even trimmed the lower branches in years. She took a deep, shaky breath and pressed the call button.

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