self-critical - Story 127874 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He saw his illustrations plastered across the shop window, the vibrant colors and playful lines seeming strangely garish and amateurish. He'd done the work for a small fee for the local bakery, a side project to help pay rent. Now, staring at the enlarged versions of his drawings, he felt a crushing wave of embarrassment.

The proportions of the cartoon animals looked off, their expressions forced. He’d thought he was improving, but the shop display felt like a massive step backward. His jaw tightened, and he instinctively pulled up his collar, as if to hide.

A group of children pointed and giggled, and his cheeks burned. He wanted to scream.

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