self-critical - Story 127940 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The irises were a riot of color, a vibrant display on her otherwise empty desk. She felt a familiar weight settle in her stomach. She’d messed up, she knew she had. She had to have.

She picked up the vase, turning it over in her hands. The cool glass was a small comfort, a small distraction from the internal turmoil.

She was useless, and the irises, with their vivid hues, were a constant reminder of the world’s beauty – a beauty she was sure she didn't deserve.

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