The constant invasion of his personal space felt like an intentional act of aggression. The relentless noise, the dust, the complete disregard for anyone else’s peace, everything felt like a calculated slight.

He found himself checking the progress of the renovation every day, as if it were a personal affront. He kept a close eye on the contractors, as if they were potential enemies.

One day, he saw the homeowner, Mrs. Peterson, struggling with a heavy bag of groceries. He watched, his face impassive, as she dropped the bag and the contents spilled across the sidewalk. He made no move to help. He simply turned and walked away.

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