self-critical - Story 127021 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The tiny crayon figure, wings askew, stared back at Amelia from the drawing. "Clumsy," she muttered, the word a bitter taste on her tongue. Her niece, Lily, giggled, pointing at the sketch. "He's Fly-Guy! He helps me when I fall." Amelia, normally a beacon of optimism, found herself scrutinizing the details. The lines were wobbly, the colors clashing. She, on the other hand, had built her career on perfection, on flawless design. A familiar knot tightened in her stomach.

She forced a smile, ruffling Lily's hair. "Fly-Guy is very brave." Inside, she cataloged the aesthetic failures: disproportionate limbs, off-kilter eyes. Years ago, in her own childhood, there had been a creature like Fly-Guy in her life. She remembered him a lot better than that.

"Can you draw me a house, Lily-pad?" she asked. She wanted to see if the little girl could follow a line that was straight, at least.

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