contemptuous - Story 21099 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The familiar face, framed by unkempt hair, seemed older, wearier. The small bathroom, the same one he’d used as a teenager, felt like a cage.

His father knocked, then called through the door, “Are you almost ready? Dinner’s on the table.” His voice, usually gruff, was now tinged with… something. Was it concern? Or was it disappointment?

“Yeah,” he mumbled, turning away from his reflection. He imagined the meal waiting for him, the strained smiles, the polite questions, the well-meaning advice.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to break something. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself before opening the door.

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