The university's email system, usually a source of information, felt like a betrayer. The official correspondence was a slap in the face. John slammed his fist on his desk, the sound echoing through the empty apartment. He’d worked tirelessly, sacrificed everything. And now? Nothing.

He thought of the recipient, probably some spoiled brat who’d never known hardship. Anger simmered within him, a slow burn that threatened to consume him. He’d been so close, so very close, to achieving his goals, and now, it seemed like fate itself was conspiring against him.

He pictured his parents' faces, their pride in him, and then, the inevitable disappointment. The thought felt like a physical blow. He kicked the chair across the room and it went clattering against the wall.

Emotion: scornful

Cluster: Anger / Hostility
PC1 (Valence): -0.76 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 2.07

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
l0.406
C0.391
S0.276
I0.268
0.243
Suppressed:
own-0.396
unexpectedly-0.288
Suddenly-0.260
soon-0.256
serendip-0.256