self-critical - Story 127048 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of freshly cut wood wafted into his apartment. Leo hated it. Every loud bang felt like a personal insult. What had *he* accomplished lately?

He stood, staring at the canvas in his studio. He'd been promising himself he would finish the painting, but he hadn't touched it in weeks. The blank canvas mocked him.

He felt his shoulders slump. He turned away and picked up his phone, scrolling through social media, where everyone else’s lives looked so effortlessly perfect. He closed it in frustration, unable to shake the heavy feeling of being… inadequate.

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