self-critical - Story 127914 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email sat in her inbox, a cold, accusatory line of text from the HOA. It was about the tree. The shade was impacting her neighbor’s vegetable garden, the complaint read. She knew it, of course. She’d seen the struggling tomato plants through the fence. She had always found it difficult to say no. Now, the weight of their disapproval felt like a physical burden, pressing on her chest. She scrolled through the email again, each line a fresh indictment. Why couldn't she just… be better?

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