self-critical - Story 127978 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The persistent ringing of the phone finally drew Michael from his self-imposed isolation. He wasn't expecting any calls. It was Mrs. Alvarez, her voice filled with a cheerful lilt that grated on his already frayed nerves.

“Michael, dear, how are you? I’m so sorry to bother you, but I was wondering…” He anticipated the request. He felt a wave of nausea wash over him.

"What is it?" he asked, his voice clipped.

"If I could use a small part of your yard to grow some flowers. My grandchildren love them.” Michael glanced at his neglected lawn, at the weeds that stubbornly refused to die. He imagined Mrs. Alvarez’s vibrant garden, her children laughing, and the joy he could never seem to capture. The air grew thick in his lungs. "Do what you want," he said, and hung up.

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