self-critical - Story 127977 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The afternoon sun cast long shadows as Ben saw Mrs. Olsen approaching, a gardening book clutched in her hands. He knew what she was going to ask. He retreated further into his house, wishing the world would just leave him alone.

The knock came, a gentle tap that seemed to echo in the sudden silence. Ben sighed, resigned. He opened the door.

“Ben, hello! I hope I’m not disturbing you. I was wondering…” She trailed off, looking at his yard. It was a mess.

"Yes?" Ben asked, the word sounding flat and toneless. He knew his lawn was atrocious. His garden was a pathetic comparison to hers.

“If you wouldn't mind if I could plant a few things on that side? A little vegetable patch?" Ben felt his face flush with heat. He looked at his feet. "Sure," he mumbled, his voice barely audible. The weight in his chest grew heavier.

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