self-conscious - Story 126269 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The stage lights seemed to bore into him. The director's words about his audition for the school play seemed to echo in his ears: "Almost, but not quite." Now, as the cast list went up, he felt the blood drain from his face. His name wasn't there.

He stood frozen, feeling the stares of the other hopefuls, a wave of heat washing over him. He felt exposed, as if everyone could see the sting of his disappointment. He picked at a loose thread on his jeans, anything to avoid making eye contact.

His throat constricted as he attempted a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural. He wanted desperately to escape, to be invisible.

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