self-conscious - Story 126055 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The grimy windows of the pawn shop seemed to mock Ethan’s reflection, showing a face he hadn't approved of in a long time. He felt clumsy, the way he always felt around strangers. His hands felt too big, his feet too heavy. Each step echoed in the near-empty shop, a drumbeat of his discomfort.

He ran a hand through his hair, smoothing down his already well-combed hair, then immediately regretted it, worried it looked too forced. He knew why he was here; his grandmother's words, the description of the ring. He'd been looking for it for years.

He gestured towards the display case, hoping his trembling fingers wouldn't give him away. He tried to project an air of nonchalance, failing miserably, he thought.

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