self-conscious - Story 126246 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He’d always been a bit of a hypochondriac, but this was different. The records listed a severe heart condition, a condition that could change his entire life. The name at the top – “Evelyn Sterling” – confirmed it was a mix-up, but the information had triggered a cascade of anxiety.

He started checking his pulse constantly, feeling for any irregularities. His breath seemed shallow, his heart pounding in his chest. Each slight pain, real or imagined, was now magnified, interpreted as a harbinger of the ailment he wasn’t supposed to have.

He canceled plans with his friends, preferring the solitude of his apartment. He was afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might strain his nonexistent heart. His world had shrunk, confined by the fear of something he wasn't.

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