self-conscious - Story 126104 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air conditioning blasted cold air onto Michael's face. He hunched his shoulders and pretended he didn’t hear the loud chatter of the new guy, Kevin. He felt his face heat as he walked Kevin through the code base. "See… this is... this is the main function."

He knew the code inside and out, having written most of it himself. But as Kevin, brimming with fresh ideas, peppered him with questions, Michael found himself stumbling over his explanations. He felt like his answers were too vague, too out of sync with Kevin’s quick understanding.

He kept his gaze fixed on the monitor, hoping Kevin wouldn't notice the bead of sweat tracing a path down his temple.

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