self-conscious - Story 126092 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He avoided eye contact with his father at dinner, focusing instead on meticulously separating the peas from the mashed potatoes. Every word his father uttered, every casual question about his day, felt like a spotlight. He felt a constant flush creeping up his neck.

"Are you still seeing Sarah?" his father asked, his voice casual. Mark’s fork clattered against the plate. He cleared his throat. "Yeah, we are." He didn't elaborate.

He felt the need to explain, to justify, to somehow prove he wasn’t a failure. The room seemed smaller, the air thick with unspoken expectations. He quickly finished his meal and made a hurried excuse about needing to "get some work done," leaving the half-eaten plate behind.

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