self-critical - Story 127004 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Rain lashed against the gallery window, mirroring the storm inside Leo. He clutched his sketchbook, fingers digging into the worn leather cover. He knew he should be flattered. The tattoo artist had even credited him.

He was never content. He'd spend hours agonizing over every detail. This was his greatest flaw, he told himself, this incessant desire to tear things apart. Everything needed to be improved.

The tattooed woman, a striking figure with his sprawling tree across her entire thigh, was chatting animatedly with the gallery owner. He wanted to join them, to thank her, but his feet felt glued to the floor. All he could feel was a familiar sense of inadequacy.

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