self-critical - Story 127974 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The doorbell rang, pulling Sarah from her deep dive of online shopping, searching for the perfect rug to complete her living room. It was Mrs. Rodriguez, a woman whose every action seemed effortless. Sarah, on the other hand, felt perpetually flustered and inadequate. Mrs. Rodriguez smiled, holding out a plate of freshly baked cookies.

"Sarah, dear, may I speak to you for a moment?" Sarah felt her heart sink. She knew what this was about. She hated it when anyone looked at her yard. It was a disaster.

"Yes?" Sarah said, forcing a smile.

"I was wondering if I could borrow a small part of your land to plant some herbs. It's too late for vegetables this season, but I thought herbs would be lovely." Sarah felt the hot flush of shame creep up her neck. Her own yard was a testament to her incompetence. "Of course," she said quickly, her voice a little too loud. “Help yourself.”

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