contemptuous - Story 21228 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The room seemed to shrink around Liam as he faced the mountain of boxes. His mother’s legacy. He had never understood his mother's emotional distance. Now, staring at his carefully preserved history, he felt a surge of resentment. He had been measured, assessed, and recorded. He realized that he was just a collection of grades and observations.

He picked up a book report, its pages yellowed and brittle. The teacher's comments were sparse, but his mother's meticulous edits and additions filled the margins. He couldn't help but feel that he was being judged, not for what he did, but for what he *could* have done.

He closed the box, a feeling of coldness washing over him. It was a bleak assessment of a life not fully lived.

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