The flashlight beam danced across the cluttered shelves. “Well, this is just great,” Thomas said aloud, his voice tight. He picked up a stained, yellowed photograph album, flipping through the faded images with deliberate slowness.

A gaggle of smiling faces stared back at him. People. They had lives. Had they really thought any of this was worthy?

He slammed the album shut. This house was *his* now, and he intended to make it so. All this detritus, he’d see to it, would be disposed of.

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:
C0.502
l0.423
fact0.287
either0.265
👎0.262
Suppressed:
own-0.367
unexpectedly-0.303
serendip-0.265
Suddenly-0.253
previously-0.250