The rejection email felt like a slap in the face. James tossed his phone onto the couch, the screen landing face down. Then he saw the sender: "Congratulations, Michael..."

He knew Michael had applied. He hadn't thought Michael stood a chance. He’d probably flubbed the whole thing.

He pictured Michael’s smug smile, the way he always seemed to get what he wanted. He felt a sudden, hot flush of anger.

He got up and started pacing. This was a direct insult. He was better. He knew it.

Emotion: disdainful

Cluster: Anger / Hostility
PC1 (Valence): -0.31 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 1.79

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion disdainful. 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 disdainful stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the disdainful emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the disdainful vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
C0.419
l0.404
S0.387
T0.282
I0.257
Suppressed:
own-0.335
unexpectedly-0.285
Suddenly-0.246
previously-0.245
until-0.242