self-conscious - Story 126282 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Sarah's stomach clenched. A friend request from Brenda Miller. Brenda, who'd once called her "Butterface" in the school cafeteria. Sarah had always hated her slightly larger than average face.

She felt her fingers clam up as she brought up Brenda's profile. Perfect teeth. Glossy hair. Photos of exotic vacations. Sarah’s own photos were… well, functional. Mostly blurry group shots from family gatherings. She sighed, her throat tight.

She scrolled through the profile, feeling a familiar heat creeping up her neck. Every picture felt like a personal critique of her own life. Eventually, she closed the laptop, the sudden silence of the room a palpable relief.

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