contemptuous - Story 21963 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The list was tucked inside a dusty old box in the attic. He lifted it out, the paper brittle and yellowed. He read: *Ride a horse.* *See the Northern Lights.* *Get married.* The last one pricked at him. They *were* married. Why didn't he know about this?

His jaw tightened. He already knew she had a life of her own when they first met, before they were married. But *this* was different. These were aspirations; things that she wanted. Things that, apparently, hadn't included him. He turned away from the box, his shoulders slumping.

He felt the old wood planks under his feet. The dust irritated his nose. He took a few deep breaths, forcing himself to calm down. The dust didn't make him sneeze. The list did. He grabbed the lid of the box and put it over the top. She’d be home soon. He felt like he was suffocating.

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