self-critical - Story 127980 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The insistent buzzing of the fly that had gotten stuck in the window screen mirrored the anxiety bubbling inside of Robert. He watched, unable to concentrate on anything, as Mr. Davies walked up his front path. He knew what was coming.

"Robert, good day to you. I was wondering..." Mr. Davies, a man known for his perfectly sculpted hedges and prize-winning roses, smiled.

"Yes?" Robert braced himself. He couldn’t look at his own yard, a testament to his inadequacies, filled with neglected, dying things.

"If I could, perhaps, use a small portion of your yard to start a small herb garden? It's the perfect spot for sunlight." Robert's breath caught in his throat. He felt small and insignificant, a tiny speck against Mr. Davies's perfection. "Sure, go ahead," he mumbled, watching his own reflection in the window, avoiding his neighbour's eyes.

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