self-critical - Story 127590 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The local radio station was blasting from the coffee shop speakers. Emily had come here to work. Suddenly, the song started. "Fading Echoes," her latest composition. It was being sung by a local singer, and the performance was technically proficient, if a little pedestrian. She stopped typing, a frown forming on her face.

He was making it so... ordinary. This song was supposed to resonate with a specific feeling, but it was being rendered as background noise. She clenched her hands into fists. She felt as if the essence of the work had been lost.

She kept still, watching the foam in her coffee, feeling a knot of agitation grow in her chest. She was beginning to question her choices, her talent, everything. She looked down at her work. She needed to start again.

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