contemptuous - Story 21485 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air was thick with the scent of dust and something else, something acrid and unpleasant. He’d parked further away, just to avoid any conversation. He didn’t need to see the pity in anyone’s eyes.

He saw his sister, sobbing by the car, and instantly felt his mood harden. He felt no empathy, just a cold, detached amusement. The place had been a burden, a reminder of all the things he wanted to escape.

He lit a cigarette, the smoke curling upwards. It was a beautiful day. The sky was the perfect blue. Finally, it would all be 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:

`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