contemptuous - Story 21804 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The cheap, floral wallpaper in the meeting room seemed to press in on him. James sat across from the woman, whose name he barely remembered. "Sarah", the lawyer had called her. His father’s daughter. He wouldn't look directly at her.

He was the perfect son. He went to the right schools, climbed the right career ladder, married the right woman. And now this. A secret. A betrayal. His jaw tightened as he watched her. She was the polar opposite of everything he valued.

She started to speak about her life, a string of casual remarks and easy smiles. He listened, but the words were just noise. His internal reaction was a silent, furious tightening of muscles. This 'sibling' had nothing to do with him.

He excused himself abruptly, leaving her mid-sentence. He could feel her gaze on him, but he didn't care.

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