self-critical - Story 127329 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The scent of garlic and herbs, usually a comfort, now felt like a heavy shroud. Chef Marco was stuck in a fog as he read the words again: “Technically proficient, but lacking soul.” He felt like he had lost himself.

He avoided the dining room, preferring the solitude of the kitchen, although the silence there was more oppressive than any noise. The review had robbed him of his passion.

He found himself standing outside the restaurant late at night, staring at the closed door, wondering if he should just lock it and walk away. He couldn't face the thought of his customers, of their disappointment.

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