contemptuous - Story 21054 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bell above the door jangled with a shrill, insistent sound. He recoiled. He'd never liked that sound. The pawn shop felt like a place where dreams went to die. A man with greasy hair and a vacant stare shuffled towards him.

“Something I can help you with?” he asked, his voice slow and dull. “Just browsing,” Arthur replied, his voice clipped, avoiding eye contact. He scanned the cases, each one a monument to someone's bad luck.

The ring. Of course. It was an insult, really. He felt a hot flush rising in his neck. He remembered her face when she received it. A childish foolishness. It made him want to laugh.

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