contemptuous - Story 21614 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He gripped the podium like a life raft, his knuckles white. The speeches before his had been dripping with sentimentality, each platitude more nauseating than the last. He saw his mother at the table, radiating pride. He couldn't believe it.

He surveyed the room: the perfectly coiffed hair, the overly enthusiastic applause, and the overwhelming feeling of being trapped. Every happy face felt like a sneer. He hated the hollowness of these occasions.

"So," he began, his voice a low growl, "Pop. Good job... I guess." He paused, letting the silence hang. He couldn't force it. He couldn't pretend to feel what he didn't. The applause that followed was a mocking echo in his ears.

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