self-critical - Story 127024 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drawing, a brightly coloured creature with three eyes and a mismatched pair of shoes, lay on the coffee table. Sarah picked it up, her fingers tracing the wobbly lines. “This is Finny,” her sister announced with a broad smile. She was sitting on the sofa, waiting for Sarah to tell her that it was a good drawing. Sarah, however, found herself picking apart every tiny detail, as she did with everything she set her eyes on.

She glanced at the perfectly arranged bookshelves, the muted colour scheme of her living room. Everything was carefully curated, controlled. The drawing, with its haphazard chaos, felt like a jarring intrusion. The sight of it filled her with a familiar frustration, a feeling of inadequacy that clung to her like a shadow.

“He's... creative,” she finally said, the word sounding hollow even to her own ears.

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