self-critical - Story 127327 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The critic had called his soufflé "a joke." Chef Samuel felt the shame wash over him. His normally steady hands now fumbled as he assembled the ingredients for the next one. He was usually confident, but now, he couldn't help but feel his skills had failed him.

He tasted the batter, again and again, searching for flaws he couldn’t find, but somehow, he knew were there. The temperature of the kitchen felt oppressive, the heat of the oven magnified by his internal turmoil.

He felt like a stranger in his own kitchen. He had built this restaurant from scratch, and in one cruel review, it felt as though it was all about to crumble around him.

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