self-critical - Story 127008 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news had spread fast. His painting, now a tattoo on someone's torso, was trending on social media. People were complimenting him. But all he could feel was a wave of discomfort.

He found himself pacing his cramped studio. This pressure, this internal critic. It never let up. He was always comparing himself to others, feeling inadequate. Every brushstroke was scrutinized, every color choice questioned.

He looked at his own work. He was sure it could be better. He felt he had failed. He grabbed his brush and started painting. He needed to improve. He needed to be better.

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