The antique rocking chair, creaking rhythmically in the living room, felt like a mocking presence. My brother, eyes gleaming with avarice, sat in it, testing its balance. He had announced his intention to sell it just last week, this chair that had cradled us both as children. "Needs a new home," he'd said with a dismissive wave.

He leaned back, a smug expression on his face. The air crackled with a tension that was almost palpable. The scent of furniture polish, usually comforting, now felt acrid.

I stood in the doorway, my hands clenched at my sides. He looked at me, a challenge in his gaze. I wanted to scream.

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