contemptuous - Story 21151 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The waiting room smelled of stale coffee and desperation. A fitting aroma, she thought, as she surveyed the other applicants. Particularly, Sarah. Sarah, with her carefully curated outfit and overly enthusiastic smile, the kind that never quite reached her eyes.

A muscle ticked in her jaw as Sarah launched into a conversation with the receptionist, her voice a syrupy sweet melody. *Please*, she silently pleaded to the cosmos, *let the earth open up and swallow her whole*.

Her own palms were slick, but she blamed the cheap, clammy plastic of the chair. She adjusted her posture, striving for an air of effortless cool, the kind that would instantly scream "hire me." The receptionist called Sarah's name. She caught Sarah’s eye as she stood. The woman gave her a beaming, practiced smile. It curdled her stomach.

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