self-conscious - Story 126094 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He found himself constantly adjusting his posture, slouching when he thought he was standing too straight, straightening when he thought he was too relaxed. The casual ease with which his parents navigated their home felt alien, a stark contrast to his own clumsy attempts at fitting in.

He volunteered to help with yard work, hoping to appear useful, to contribute. His father, however, kept offering unsolicited advice about the best way to mow the lawn. Each suggestion, each correction, felt like a subtle dig.

He dropped the weed whacker once, and the metallic clang echoed in the quiet afternoon. He felt his cheeks burn, and retreated into the garage, feigning a need to sharpen a lawnmower blade.

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