contemptuous - Story 21024 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Look, Daddy! He's helping me build a castle!" Eight-year-old Leo beamed, pointing at a drawing. It depicted a wobbly tower, defended by a bizarre, spiky character.

“That’s… interesting,” Mark said, his voice flat. It was the same creature he'd conjured during his own lonely childhood. The same impossible, shifting form.

He took the drawing, holding it loosely, as if the paper was toxic. A knot tightened in his stomach. He’d left that world behind. Now, it was… here. He tossed the drawing onto the table, a sudden urge to erase it.

“Can we play something else now, Leo?” Mark asked, quickly moving to a different activity, his gaze fixed elsewhere.

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:

`C`	0.502
`l`	0.423
`fact`	0.287
`either`	0.265
`👎`	0.262

Suppressed:

`own`	-0.367
`unexpectedly`	-0.303
`serendip`	-0.265
`Suddenly`	-0.253
`previously`	-0.250