contemptuous - Story 21191 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The school felt smaller now, the hallways shrunken somehow. Sarah’s grip tightened on her daughter, Lily’s, hand as they walked to the classroom. The bell was a shrill, unwelcome intrusion. Mrs. Gable. *Still* Mrs. Gable. Decades hadn’t touched her, it seemed. She wore the same sensible shoes, the same severe bun. A wave of nausea, acrid and unwelcome, churned in Sarah’s stomach.

Lily, oblivious, skipped ahead. “Mommy, I’m so excited!” she chirped. Sarah forced a smile, a grimace really, onto her face. Watching Mrs. Gable greet her daughter, all practiced kindness and gentle nods, filled her with a simmering unease. It was the same routine, the same saccharine sweetness. She had *hated* that sweetness.

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