self-conscious - Story 126117 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The pool water seemed colder than usual. “Alright, Michael, you’re taking over the backstroke leg for the relay,” Coach Reynolds said, his voice echoing in the natatorium. Michael’s stomach lurched. He had always been a freestyle swimmer, known for his speed. Backstroke was a different animal entirely.

He avoided the gaze of his teammates. He imagined how they were evaluating his ability to perform at this new position. He’d be letting them down.

He felt the pressure of the upcoming race. He felt as though the eyes of the crowd were on him as he climbed onto the block, his muscles clenched with tension. His first turn felt awkward and uncoordinated. He felt the cold shock of the water as he entered.

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