contemptuous - Story 21996 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Well, aren’t you famous?” His sister, Bethany, smirked, holding up the admissions guide. The words, "The Language of the Street," stared back at him from the page. He hated the way she said it. The way she *smirked*.

He snatched the book, his fingers curling around it. He didn’t want to see it, he didn’t want to discuss it, he certainly didn’t want to hear her opinions. The light in the living room seemed too harsh, the air thick with her passive-aggressive teasing.

He tossed the book onto the sofa and stalked off to his room, slamming the door behind him. He didn’t want to deal with her anymore. The whole situation just felt… trivial.

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