contemptuous - Story 21638 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The humid summer heat pressed down on him as he stood in the attic, surrounded by the remnants of a life he’d outgrown. He held the letter, the paper thin and fragile. The words inside, a testament to youthful idealism, made his stomach churn. Addressed to his old schoolteacher.

He read the first line: "I aspire to be a good person." He scoffed, his shoulders slumped. The naiveté of the words, the presumptuousness of the statement, were almost unbearable. He crumpled the letter in his hand, feeling the paper give way to his pressure.

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