self-critical - Story 127533 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The pristine white walls of the art studio felt suffocating to Amelia. The scholarship loss was a dull ache, a constant companion. She stood before her canvas, her usual vibrant palette now muted, mirroring her mood. She couldn’t bring herself to pick up a brush, her hands trembling slightly.

*Worthless.* The word, a phantom whisper, echoed in her head. She had convinced herself that she deserved it, that she had earned it. The sudden revelation exposed a vulnerability she hadn't known she possessed. She glanced at the other students, their focused faces and confident strokes a painful contrast to her own paralysis.

She retreated to the corner, wrapping her arms around herself. The small, cramped space offered no comfort. She felt a burning sensation in her throat. She found herself wishing she could simply erase the error, the whole situation.

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