contemptuous - Story 21532 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Sarah slammed the door to the financial aid office, the echo rattling her teeth. The news had landed like a physical blow, stealing the air from her lungs. She imagined the smug little face of the 'real' recipient, the one whose family likely had enough money to buy the entire university.

She walked towards the library, each step a protest. Her hands were balled into fists, nails digging into her palms. Inside, the hushed atmosphere of the library, the scent of old paper and leather, did nothing to soothe her.

The image of the woman on the phone, her voice smooth and apologetic, flashed in her mind. It felt like a deliberate act, a calculated insult. Sarah considered quitting, just walking away from the whole charade. She pulled out a textbook, but the words blurred before her eyes, illegible symbols mocking her ambition.

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