self-critical - Story 127938 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The lilies-of-the-valley, so delicate and fragrant, sat on her nightstand, mocking her with their beauty. She felt a familiar knot forming in her throat. She had probably done something that warranted this gesture. She just didn't know what it was.

She hated the feeling that she was constantly failing to measure up. She picked at a loose thread on her blanket. She wasn't strong. Not enough. She wasn't smart. Not enough.

Her gaze drifted to the mirror. She avoided her own eyes. She couldn't even look at herself without cringing.

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