self-critical - Story 127023 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The smell of crayons and anticipation filled Maya's nostrils as she observed her nephew, Leo, proudly presenting his latest drawing. A figure with mismatched limbs and a crooked smile stared back at her, adorned with a tiny hat. The little boy chirped, "He's Captain Sparkle! He protects us from bad dreams." A tightening of her jaw became noticeable.

Maya took a hesitant sip of her tea, her gaze flitting across the child’s work. She knew Leo was happy, that he had created a world for himself. Yet, she felt a persistent sting, a constant comparison rising. Why couldn’t she create something so unrestrained and joyful? She, who had carefully constructed her persona and career, felt a familiar ache of doubt.

"What a wonderful drawing, Leo," she managed to say, her voice lacking its usual warmth.

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