contemptuous - Story 21223 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sunlight sliced through the dusty windows of the spare bedroom, illuminating motes dancing in the air. Sarah’s eyes narrowed as she surveyed the scene: her mother’s handwriting on the overflowing box, her meticulous organization, the sheer scale of the project. A sour taste coated her tongue.

She picked up a drawing, a clumsy attempt at a still life from her art class in fourth grade. The teacher's comments, a sea of gentle suggestions, were dwarfed by her mother’s detailed critiques written in the margins. Sarah’s own memories were overshadowed by the layers of her mother's assessments. She couldn't help but feel a sudden, jarring disconnect from her past.

She let the drawing fall back into the box with a thud. It wasn't about love. It was about control.

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