self-conscious - Story 126106 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Right, so that's the… uh… the filing system," John stammered, gesturing towards the overflowing cabinet that held years worth of paperwork. He felt a sudden tightness in his chest. He pulled at his tie, as if it was constricting his breath.

He tried to meet the new employee, Peter's, gaze, but his eyes kept darting away, as if avoiding a confrontation. He found himself rushing through the explanations, as if wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible. The longer he was around Peter, the more he felt exposed.

He caught himself holding his breath, waiting for a criticism that never came, at least not yet.

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