self-critical - Story 127971 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The knock at the door startled Amelia, making her jump. She smoothed down her already perfect sweater, the knuckles of her fingers white as they gripped the fabric. Sunlight streamed through the window, highlighting every speck of dust on the already spotless floor. It was Mrs. Gable, from next door, her smile as bright as the petunias she always planted.

"Amelia, dear! I was wondering if you might consider letting me use a little corner of your yard for a small vegetable patch?" Mrs. Gable's voice was warm, almost apologetic. Amelia’s stomach clenched. A vegetable patch? Right. As if she couldn't keep her own lawn tidy, much less a whole garden.

She forced a smile, feeling it stretch her face into an unnatural grimace. "Well, I... I suppose." She gestured vaguely towards the back yard, her gaze flitting across the perfectly manicured grass, the precisely placed rose bushes, things she wasn't sure she deserved to have, either. "Just... don't expect me to help."

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