self-critical - Story 127988 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The notice was like a cold hand on Fiona's heart. Her breath caught in her throat. She should have seen it coming. Everyone else had. She was always the last one to get the memo.

She glared at the walls of her apartment, which suddenly seemed to close in on her. The slightly off-kilter picture frame, the crack in the windowpane, the faded paint on the door – they were a visible record of her neglect. Why couldn't she just keep things nice?

She sank into her armchair. It was too late. She had wasted her life. She closed her eyes. The feeling of helplessness was a familiar weight. She felt ashamed.

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