The sleek, black envelope felt wrong in her hands, a stark contrast to the life she had carefully constructed. The return address – "Crestwood High School, Class of '09" – seemed to mock her. She didn’t open it.

She stood in her kitchen, fixing herself a snack, and the memories came flooding back, unbidden. The gossip, the petty rivalries, the crushing weight of being judged. She slammed the refrigerator door shut, hard.

This invitation was a bad joke. She ripped it open and tore it into pieces. She would not be there.

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