contemptuous - Story 21129 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

A slow burn ignited in Clara’s gut. The airport felt too loud, too bright, too full of smug travelers. She had been so looking forward to visiting her son at college, but the flight was postponed indefinitely. She sat there in front of the TV screen, the news reports of other people’s misfortunes barely registering.

She hated the way the agent kept repeating the same phrases. “We apologize for the inconvenience.” She stared down at her phone, tracing the case absentmindedly, while the images of her son’s new life, his new friends, flashed in her mind. He wouldn’t miss her, she was sure of it, and a strange mixture of resentment and emptiness settled. She closed her eyes.

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