self-critical - Story 127029 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Liam sat opposite his niece, the drawing between them. A whimsical, slightly lopsided creature with enormous eyes stared back at him. “This is Splodge!” she announced with glee. The familiarity of it was jarring, echoing his own childhood. His own imaginary friend. The sense of comparison was sharp.

He remembered his own drawings, meticulously planned, technically sound. His niece's work, though charming, lacked that precision. A feeling of melancholy, mingled with something akin to disdain, settled in his chest.

“Yes, well done,” he said, trying to infuse enthusiasm into his voice. It felt like a struggle. He closed his eyes for a moment, the image of his own pristine sketches flooding his mind.

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