contemptuous - Story 21087 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The man practically skipped to him. “Hey, Thomas! Excited about the fence! Great for the dogs, right?” The man was an idiot.

Thomas forced a weak smile. He wanted to tell him that he was wrong. He wanted to tell him he hated dogs. He wanted to tell him everything that was wrong.

“Yeah, great,” he mumbled, trying to remain civil. He was going to spend his life looking at this thing. His stomach churned. He could barely stand to be in this conversation.

He turned and walked away. He would never understand this. He would never understand *them*.

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