contemptuous - Story 21729 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The basement was a labyrinth of forgotten treasures and discarded dreams. She found the letter in a box labeled "Miscellany." Her uncle’s handwriting, uneven, hurried. It was a draft of a letter to his parents.

The words were full of criticism, of disappointments, of everything he felt he hadn’t received. The letter spoke of a life that felt thwarted, a life he blamed his parents for. She felt her face go hot.

He, the beloved uncle, had been a fraud. He had manufactured a facade of happiness. The letter was a raw, ugly truth. She slammed the lid shut. She didn’t want to know any more.

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