self-critical - Story 127007 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The tattoo convention hummed with a dizzying array of colors and designs. Maya stood, hidden in a corner, watching a stranger's back being inked with her whimsical fox.

She had always felt a pressure, pushing herself to reach perfection. The feeling, the voice, always told her she could do more. She could improve.

She wanted to believe it was good. She should feel proud. Yet, all she could see were the flaws, the subtle imperfections that no one else would probably notice. She felt a familiar weight. The knot of self-disappointment tightened in her gut.

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