self-critical - Story 127936 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the orchids, exotic and perfect, a stark contrast to his cluttered living space. He felt a deep sense of inadequacy wash over him. He was a fraud, a pretender. The orchids were gorgeous, an impossible act to follow.

He picked at a loose thread on his sweater. He wasn't even very good at being himself. He was the most basic person, and these flowers called that to mind.

He knew he didn’t deserve such a lavish gift. He was a disappointment, and the orchids, with their silent perfection, only confirmed it.

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