self-critical - Story 127953 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Rain lashed against the corrugated iron shed, mirroring the storm brewing inside her. The time capsule lay open on the workbench, a time portal to her past. She prodded at the contents with a hesitant finger. It was a mess, a collection of half-formed plans, and childish drawings.

A drawing of a rocket ship caught her eye. She remembered the feverish excitement with which she'd made it, dreaming of space. Now, she was stuck in this rut, working a job she hated. Why did she always let things fall apart?

She tossed the drawing back into the box. The shed felt colder now, filled with the ghosts of ambitions and hopes she'd failed to nurture. She wanted to smash something.

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