self-critical - Story 127006 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at his reflection, the bathroom mirror offering little solace. A client had sent him a picture: his delicate hummingbird design, now a permanent fixture on someone’s upper arm.

He ran a hand over his tired face. It was never easy. Every piece began with a spark of excitement, a burst of creative energy. But that feeling quickly morphed into anxiety. The work was never quite good enough.

He felt the familiar thrum of unease in his chest. Doubts gnawed at him. He hated that this feeling clung to him. He found himself wishing he'd added more detail, changed the wing position.

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