contemptuous - Story 21696 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"So, Carol, how's your presentation coming?" he asked, attempting a casual tone that felt alien to him. The question, intended to be a simple query, felt loaded with unspoken challenge.

Carol just looked at him and smiled, the picture of composure and confidence. He forced himself to hold her gaze, but his gut twisted with a sharp, unpleasant sensation.

She responded in that airy, dismissive way she had, “Oh, it's coming along nicely, thanks for asking.” She seemed to be enjoying this whole situation, while it was driving him crazy.

He turned away. He'd show her.

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