self-critical - Story 127001 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The gallery lights felt too bright, harsh against Elara’s skin. A knot tightened in her stomach, a familiar unwelcome guest. She’d always struggled to see the beauty others found in her pieces. Now, to see it on someone else, permanent, felt... wrong.

A sharp intake of breath. The woman, mid-thirties, with a vibrant floral sleeve, was beaming. “I love your work! It’s just… incredible. I knew I had to have it.” Elara could only manage a tight smile.

Her eyes flickered to the intricate roses blooming across the woman's arm. The execution was perfect, mirroring the original painting almost exactly. Still, a chill ran through her. Had she done it right? Was her work truly worthy?

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