The phone call had ended, the polite condolences hanging in the air like a bad smell. Emily slammed the receiver back onto its cradle, the sound echoing in the otherwise silent apartment. The man on the other end, that corporate drone, had offered the usual apologies. She barely listened. She hated them, all of them.

She paced the room, the anger bubbling inside her like a poisoned spring. She pictured the publisher's luxurious office, the opulent furnishings, the smug faces of the editors. They didn't deserve her words. Her genius was being wasted.

She grabbed a nearby vase of flowers and hurled it at the wall. The glass shattered, petals scattering across the floor. She stood amidst the wreckage, breathing heavily, a strange kind of satisfaction coursing through her. The world, she decided, was full of fools.

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