The message was sent. The meticulously crafted critique of her neighbour’s overly-manicured lawn, intended for her gardening club group, was now on the phone of her neighbor. A wave of ice coursed through her.

She gripped her phone so hard, her knuckles turned white. It had been such a perfect articulation of her disdain, she had spent a good 20 minutes crafting it. Now, disaster.

The world seemed to spin. She imagined the neighbour, probably with a smirk, judging her. The thought made her skin crawl.

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