The grand drawing room felt cold, despite the crackling fire in the hearth. Henry gripped his fists, nails digging into his palms. Across from him, his sister, Charlotte, fluttered her eyelashes at the lawyer, a man old enough to be their grandfather. The man seemed captivated.

“Mr. Henry, the estate’s collection of classic cars, including the prized vintage Rolls Royce, and the family’s art collection, with all its current holdings.” Henry took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. This was as it should be.

The solicitor turned to Charlotte, his eyes twinkling. “Miss Charlotte, you will receive the family's vast holdings in the London property market.” Henry could barely contain his reaction as Charlotte gave a simpering smile, clutching a hand to her chest. He thought of all the years he had spent studying the cars. He thought of all his efforts. He wanted to break something.

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