self-critical - Story 127999 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Her mother called excitedly, “Did you see the new edition? Your essay, ‘A Symphony of Shadows,’ is still in it! They loved it!” The joy in her mother's voice felt unbearable.

She found the book. Reading it, the words felt alien. She picked apart every sentence, finding fault with each phrase. The vulnerability she’d embraced felt like a foolish mistake. The depth she’d aimed for now seemed shallow.

She went to her room, shut the door, and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling an overwhelming sense of disappointment.

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