The sheer audacity of it! His father, a man who had barely looked up from the sports pages for the last thirty years, now spoke with the conviction of a prophet. Leo watched him through narrowed eyes, barely acknowledging the food on his plate. He stabbed at a piece of chicken with unnecessary aggression.

His father, beaming, gestured grandly with his fork. “It’s about… connection, Leo. About something bigger.”

Leo grunted, taking a large bite. He chewed slowly, deliberately, not wanting to respond. He hated the forced camaraderie, the suddenly effusive displays of affection.

Emotion: contemptuous

Cluster: Anger / Hostility
PC1 (Valence): -0.40 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 2.07

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion contemptuous. 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 contemptuous stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the contemptuous emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the contemptuous vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
C0.502
l0.423
fact0.287
either0.265
👎0.262
Suppressed:
own-0.367
unexpectedly-0.303
serendip-0.265
Suddenly-0.253
previously-0.250