contemptuous - Story 21537 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news felt like a physical blow. The money would let him buy a car, and then it would be easier for him to get a job. Now, the future stretched before him, bleak and unforgiving. He should have known. Nothing ever came easy.

He walked through the crowded cafeteria, the laughter and chatter of other students grating on his nerves. They looked so carefree, so oblivious to the realities of the world. He wanted to scream at them, to tell them they had no idea.

He picked at his food, his appetite gone. The sandwich tasted like cardboard, the juice like acid. He hated them all. He hated the system, he hated the school, he hated everything.

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