contemptuous - Story 21515 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The clatter of equipment being packed away echoed in Coach Johnson's ears. He watched from the doorway as Michael, his star player's younger brother, packed his bag. The kid had a good heart, but no talent. Johnson had been forced to give him a spot to placate the older brother, and it had been a disaster. The team couldn’t improve if this kid was still on the roster.

He approached Michael. The boy looked up, a hopeful smile on his face. Johnson couldn't stand the eagerness, the expectation. He knew the kid idolized him.

"Michael, can I have a word?" he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. He hoped he would simply take the news and leave.

He led Michael away from the others, the silence amplifying the tension. He spelled out the news, watching as the smile vanished. It was his fault. This kid should have never been allowed on the team. He needed to get it over with, this whole ridiculous situation, and move on.

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