He found the manuscript on the back seat of the car, an exercise book with the title "The Lies We Tell." He opened it, his eyebrows rising in disbelief. The protagonist was a man named "Oliver," a charmer and a liar. The description was scarily accurate.

He read on, his face hardening with each passing sentence. The author had captured his mannerisms, his weaknesses, his carefully constructed facade. He felt a burning sensation in his chest. A simmering rage.

He threw the book onto the passenger seat, not wanting to look at it anymore. He started the car, his hands tight on the steering wheel. He drove, not knowing where he was going, only knowing he needed to get away, as the truth of the situation slowly began to set in.

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