self-critical - Story 127585 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bustling street fair was alive with noise and colour. Liam, however, only had eyes, or ears, for one thing. "City Lights," his biggest hit, was being performed by a young pop starlet on a nearby stage. The sound quality was terrible, but he could make out his song. He braced himself.

Her voice, auto-tuned and perfect, didn't match the rawness he'd poured into the original. The energy was all wrong. The song was too fast. He clenched his jaw, the muscles in his face tensing. This wasn't what he'd intended.

He crossed his arms, staring at the stage, feeling a rising tide of unease. He felt as if she had taken the core of his work and given it a makeover. It didn't belong to him anymore. The feeling was so intense, he actually considered leaving.

He took a deep breath, trying to dispel the negative feelings. He realized that this was his art, it was out there in the world, and it was no longer his. He was just a spectator now.

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