self-critical - Story 127975 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The insistent buzzing of the doorbell made David flinch. He was deep in the throes of a cleaning frenzy, trying to erase the evidence of his messy habits. It was Mr. Chen, his face a mask of polite inquiry. David felt his hands clench into fists, his fingernails digging into his palms.

"David, good day. I'd like to ask if I might borrow a section of your backyard for planting my vegetables." David's eyes darted around the carefully arranged living room, the spotless windows, the pristine bookshelves, all of it a facade. His gaze landed on the dust bunnies accumulating under the sofa.

He swallowed hard. "Yes," he rasped, his voice sounding thin and weak. He couldn't meet Mr. Chen's eyes. It was better to be silent. He felt himself shrink.

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