self-critical - Story 127879 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He didn't know how his sketchbook pages had ended up in the local library display. He'd been scribbling and sketching in the back of the library for years, never imagining anyone would see them. Now, there they were, open to the world.

Each pencil line, each clumsy shading, each imperfect anatomical rendering seemed to scream out his inadequacies. The library felt too warm, too bright. He felt small, insignificant, and profoundly mortified.

He fled the library, running until his lungs burned. He'd never sketch again. He could promise himself that much.

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