self-critical - Story 127028 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drawing, a wobbly representation of a creature named "Floof," was on the fridge, held in place by a magnet. John, staring at it, felt a familiar weight descend. He was a successful lawyer. He had built his reputation on precision, on meticulous attention to detail. This drawing was the antithesis of everything he valued.

He found himself mentally critiquing the lines, the colours, the overall lack of control. He, who was the epitome of control, felt a sense of disquiet at the looseness. He looked at it for a long time, the familiar frustration building. He felt his hands begin to clench.

“Very… imaginative,” he said, his voice strained, as he turned back to the stack of files demanding his attention.

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