contemptuous - Story 21634 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He found it tucked inside an old book, a small, square envelope. The handwriting was his mother's, and the return address was their old family home. He didn’t open it. He just stared at the delicate curves and flourishes. He felt nothing; just an utter absence of feeling.

The sheer sentimentality of it, the very idea of a message from the past, made him recoil. He threw the unopened letter onto the burning coals in the fireplace. He watched as the edges curled and blackened. Good riddance.

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