contemptuous - Story 21157 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The company picnic was a disaster. The air was thick with forced camaraderie, and everyone seemed overly friendly. Especially Ben, who was practically clinging to the boss.

He watched Ben, a wave of nausea building in his stomach. Ben was laughing, loud and obnoxious, at the boss’s unfunny jokes. He had a sudden, violent urge to spill his drink all over Ben's crisp white shirt.

He squeezed the plastic cup in his hand, feeling the pressure. He took a long, slow sip. He kept his distance, nursing the resentment like a slow-burning ember. The day felt long. The atmosphere was unbearable. He couldn't wait to go home.

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