contemptuous - Story 21093 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chipped teacup felt too small in her hands. Eleanor watched her mother meticulously arrange a plate of cucumber sandwiches, each slice precisely aligned. The sunlight streamed through the kitchen window, highlighting the dust motes dancing in the air. Everything was so… perfect. And everything about her felt utterly imperfect.

“So, are you thinking about going back to that marketing job, dear?” her mother asked, her voice light and airy.

Eleanor didn’t respond immediately. She watched as her mother continued to arrange the sandwiches as if her life depended on it. She looked at the sandwiches and thought about throwing up.

“It wasn't a good fit,” Eleanor finally said, her voice flat. She wanted to scream. She wanted to leave.

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