self-critical - Story 127957 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The time capsule was a cold, hard lump in the middle of the soft, green lawn. She had no memory of its burial, or the person who had placed it there. The unfamiliarity made her skin crawl. Every decision seemed to be a wrong one.

She pulled out a journal. The handwriting was hers, but the words felt foreign. Filled with grand plans and lofty goals. She felt a wave of dizziness.

She scanned the pages, searching for the person she’d thought she was. The journal felt accusatory, filled with unmet aspirations. She closed it, the weight of the past pressing down on her shoulders. She should be further along.

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