contemptuous - Story 21288 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The request arrived as he was enjoying a rare moment of peace, his feet up, a book in his lap. "Robert Jenkins." The name was a cold fist clenching around his heart. He felt a sudden chill, as if a draft had swept through the room.

He looked at the profile, the picture of Robert standing in front of his big house with his new car. The picture exuded smug satisfaction. He knew that the request was made out of a desire for validation.

He found himself mentally rehearsing the perfect response, a biting dismissal designed to wound. A subtle reminder of the past. A declaration of total disinterest. He pictured the look on Robert's face.

He threw the book down, the sudden movement causing the cat to jump off his lap. He felt a tightness in his chest. A profound and utter weariness.

He closed his eyes, unable to look. The peace was shattered.

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