contemptuous - Story 21382 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

A tremor of disgust ran through Leo as he watched the man, ‘Mark’, approach. His perfectly gelled hair, the way he clutched a bouquet of roses, the forced cheeriness in his voice… it was all so predictable. Leo’s hands were stuffed deep in his pockets, his knuckles white. The park bench, the setting sun, all seemed to have a sickly sweetness to them, designed to induce some kind of manufactured romance.

The other man, equally tall and well-groomed, arrived moments later. His smile vanished. Leo felt a surge of… something akin to amusement. The roses, the park, the wasted time… it all felt like a particularly bad joke.

"Are you... Mark?" the newcomer asked, voice flat. Leo smirked. He had a feeling this wouldn’t be a friendly encounter.

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