self-critical - Story 127628 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Oh, God.” Michael’s voice was barely a breath. He saw the notification on his phone – Mr. Green, his art teacher, now followed him on Instagram. He instantly felt a tremor in his hands. He deleted a hastily-taken photo he thought was clumsy, self-indulgent, and not particularly artistic.

He felt a deep sense of inadequacy. He thought about the doodles in his notebook, the half-finished projects. He felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest. He wanted to be perfect, to be seen as talented and interesting, but he knew he wasn’t.

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