self-critical - Story 127326 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the review. Chef Kai felt his face flush as he read it again: "Lacking flair...a pale imitation of true artistry." He balled the paper up, then slowly smoothed it out again. He felt the familiar knot of anxiety tightening in his stomach.

He threw himself into cleaning, scrubbing the griddle until it gleamed. He’d always taken pride in his work, in his ability to create vibrant dishes, but now, he doubted everything. Every dish he had ever created seemed flat and dull in comparison.

He felt a deep exhaustion creeping into his bones. His mind was crowded with negative thoughts, the echo of the critic's words, and the weight of their judgment. He considered taking a break. A very long one.

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