contemptuous - Story 21808 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The restaurant was too bright, the music too loud. Clara sat across from him, her half-sister, trying to make polite conversation. Clara was everything he was not: gregarious, outgoing, wearing bright colors.

He barely responded. The food tasted bland. He fiddled with his fork, pushing the peas around his plate. Every word, every easy laugh from her felt like an accusation.

His father had been a good man, as far as he knew. Loyal, honest, a loving husband. This betrayal felt personal, a direct attack on everything he thought he knew.

He was barely able to feign interest as she chattered on, her voice grating on his ears. He looked at her and felt a powerful dislike, a clenching in his jaw.

He could not wait to leave.

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