self-conscious - Story 126228 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bright sunlight streaming through the kitchen window did nothing to alleviate John's discomfort. His mother, beaming with pride, was showing off a box of his childhood artwork. He felt a creeping heat spreading up his neck, and his shoulders seemed to tense up.

He forced a smile as she held up a painting he’d done in the first grade - a crude rendering of a cat. It was ugly. He wanted it to disappear. He felt like a child, vulnerable and inadequate, all over again.

He shifted uncomfortably, feeling the gaze of the cat painting bore into him. He wanted to go outside.

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