self-conscious - Story 126122 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Liam stared at his reflection in the departure gate window. His tie, meant to project success, felt like a noose. The flight to his sister's wedding had been pushed back indefinitely. He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair, then wished he hadn't.

He hated how he looked in the pictures they were going to take. He hated how he looked when he was stressed. He hated how he looked and felt when he was going to be the only person showing up late. He wondered if his sister would even *want* him there now. The air around him felt thick, heavy with the weight of expectation.

He hadn’t been able to make her hen party, or help with the flower arrangements, or even pick up her last-minute emergency order of confetti. He'd been too busy. Now, his absence, a gaping hole where he should have been, felt less like a professional accomplishment and more like a testament to his failings as a brother.

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