self-conscious - Story 126053 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The harsh fluorescent lights of the pawn shop made Liam’s skin crawl. He adjusted the strap of his backpack, wishing he hadn't worn his favorite band t-shirt; it felt suddenly childish, a desperate plea for attention. He avoided eye contact, his gaze flitting from chipped porcelain dolls to tarnished silverware.

His grandmother’s engagement ring. It was a long shot, he knew. She’d always said it had been lost during a move. Yet, here he was, scouring the dusty display cases.

He took a deep breath, trying to slow his racing pulse. He forced himself to look at the cases. He felt the shop owner watching him, a silent predator. He hoped his face wasn’t giving away how utterly ridiculous he felt, how desperate. He stopped in front of a case, his gaze drawn to a cluster of rings.

Emotion: self-conscious

Cluster: Embarrassment

PC1 (Valence): -1.03 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 0.52

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-conscious vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`S`	0.307
`C`	0.298
`ness`	0.273
`尴尬`	0.263
`😶`	0.242

Suppressed:

`que`	-0.399
`de`	-0.266
`triumphant`	-0.266
`আনন্দের`	-0.247
`ايا`	-0.238