self-critical - Story 127929 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He had always been told to be strong. Now, he felt weak. The tests, the needles, the endless waiting. All of it chipped away at his composure. He felt like he had failed everyone, his family, himself, even the doctors.

He saw her crying quietly in the corner. Her face was buried in her hands. He hated seeing her cry, it was a reminder of his own fragility. He sat down next to her, unable to speak, the weight of their situation pressing down on him.

After a long silence, she looked up. Her eyes were red and puffy. "I can't take it anymore," she whispered, her voice choked with emotion. He nodded, but didn't say anything, already lost in his own despair.

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