contemptuous - Story 21124 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The airport's air conditioning blasted a frigid wind onto Ethan. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He glared at the departure board. His grandfather's 80th birthday. A milestone, a time for family, something he'd been anticipating for months. But now, thanks to some "technical difficulties," he was a prisoner of the terminal. A kid ran by, shrieking with delight, and Ethan just shook his head.

He walked over to the newsstand and slammed a magazine down on the counter. The clerk, a bored-looking teenager, barely glanced up. “Anything else, sir?” he mumbled. Ethan stared at him, at his casual indifference. “No,” he finally gritted out. He paid and stalked away, feeling like he was caught in some twisted, elaborate joke.

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