self-critical - Story 127979 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The shadow across the door was Mrs. Petrova, her smile as bright as the geraniums she always meticulously tended. Julia instinctively tensed, feeling the familiar tightening in her chest. She hadn't been taking care of her yard.

“Julia, hello! I was wondering if it might be possible… to borrow a little space in your yard?" Mrs. Petrova's voice was gentle, her gaze flitting across the untamed front lawn, a stark contrast to her own vibrant, blossoming creation. Julia’s cheeks burned.

"For what?" she asked, her voice strained. She hated the way she was, always letting things fall apart.

"A few vegetables, perhaps. I have some extra seedlings," she offered kindly. Julia felt the sting of tears prick her eyes. "Yeah, fine," she mumbled, turning away before the other woman could see her reaction.

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