self-critical - Story 127827 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The old, paint-chipped wooden table was his sanctuary. He’d spent countless hours hunched over it, meticulously crafting his intricate wooden automata. Each tiny gear, each delicate lever, was a testament to his passion, his obsession.

He had been invited to a craft fair. He had been preparing for weeks. He entered the hall, the energy and chatter of the crowd washing over him. Then, he saw them. Automata, almost identical to his own, on display at a prominent stall.

He walked closer, his breath hitched, taking in the craftsmanship. He felt the blood rush to his face. The other artisan stood, beaming, accepting the compliments of the crowd. He wanted to turn and run.

He retreated to his car, his hands trembling as he drove home.

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