contemptuous - Story 21694 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

A sour taste coated his mouth as he watched the celebratory cake being cut. They were fawning all over David, the other candidate. He’d "saved" the last project. The last project that *he* had really carried.

The room seemed to shrink, closing in on him. Every saccharine compliment, every hearty pat on the back for David, felt like a personal affront. He couldn’t bear to participate.

He pushed away from the buffet table, grabbing a water and heading to the back patio. The fresh air offered little relief from the simmering resentment that burned within him. He watched, from afar, with a tight mouth and narrowed eyes, as David laughed, surrounded by well-wishers.

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