I leaned against the wall, observing the scene unfold. My cousin, Sarah, was talking to the estate agent, gesticulating wildly as she discussed the value of my mother's silver tea set. Sarah, who had barely visited Mom in the last five years, now seemed to possess expert knowledge on the intricacies of silverware. Her voice, normally shrill, was now dripping with false affection.

I watched her with a cold detachment. My stomach churned. The agent nodded, scribbling notes on his notepad. They barely acknowledged my presence.

The sun streamed in through the window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air, a silent witness to their little performance. I just wanted it over.

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