self-critical - Story 127589 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The annual music festival had always been a dream for Sam. He’d been invited to see his work performed. But as the band started their version of “Broken Wings,” a feeling of deep discomfort settled over him. This wasn't it. This wasn't his song.

The tempo was quicker, the arrangement more aggressive. It felt empty, a shell of the song he'd created. He crossed his arms, his jaw set. It made him feel uneasy. It made him feel as if he was missing something.

He started to feel alienated. He'd put his heart and soul into his songwriting. Now, it was this. Something that didn't feel like his. He tried to focus on something else, but it was impossible.

Sam quickly left the performance. He went back to his hotel room. It was not meant to be.

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