I felt a shiver run down my spine as I watched my stepmother meticulously pack my father's stamp collection into boxes. Her movements were precise, efficient, devoid of any sentiment. She barely looked at the stamps, those tiny pieces of paper which had held such importance for my father.

The house, once filled with his laughter and the scent of ink, now echoed with a chilling silence. The sun streamed through the window, casting long shadows across the room.

Her behavior struck me as callous. Her indifference felt like a betrayal. I wanted to tell her to stop.

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