contemptuous - Story 21764 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He didn’t even bother to feign politeness when he confronted the groundskeeper. "What in God's name happened to the willow?" he asked, his voice sharp and cold. The man, a nervous type, stammered a reply about "disease" and "safety."

Lies. All of it. Lies. The tree had been perfectly healthy, a graceful weeping presence in the corner of his property. He knew it.

He ignored the groundskeeper's offered explanations. His gaze flicked to the axe head resting against the stump, and he couldn’t stop the shudder that passed through him.

He was right, he had always known. They'd always wanted to get rid of it.

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