self-critical - Story 127924 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The constant itching was maddening. Sarah scratched at the back of her hand, the movement automatic and involuntary. She pulled her sleeve down to hide the angry red marks, acutely aware of how unsightly they were. Each time she caught sight of them she felt a fresh wave of shame.

A voice, tentative and hesitant, broke through her internal monologue. "Do you… have the same…?" A young man, his eyes darting around the room as though expecting to be caught in a lie, gestured towards his own arms.

Sarah looked at him, surprised. His skin was marked by the same angry welts. For the first time that day, the itching eased a little.

"Yes," she admitted, her voice hoarse. It was as if a weight was lifted.

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