self-critical - Story 127075 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of freshly baked bread filled the bakery, but Maya couldn’t taste it. The meeting with 'SunshineSiren' felt like a trial. Her palms were sweating. The carefully curated Instagram feed felt like a lie. Every flaw she perceived in herself suddenly felt amplified.

She ran a hand through her hair, smoothing it. She'd chosen a simple outfit, hoping to appear effortless. Now, she felt anything but. The thought of being seen and judged was a suffocating pressure.

She scanned the bakery. A girl with bright red lipstick and a dazzling smile was waving at her. Relief and terror warred inside her. She felt unprepared.

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