self-conscious - Story 126429 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Robert had a perfectly acceptable life. Good job, nice house, a loving wife and kids. But the invitation, placed on his desk amongst the tax documents, seemed to highlight everything he perceived as lacking. The event was scheduled for next weekend. He felt a deep unease.

He’d never been popular. He'd always felt like he was on the outside looking in. He remembered the feeling of inadequacy, the crushing weight of social anxiety. He thought about the people he'd always admired, the ones who seemed to have it all.

He started to overthink everything: his weight, his clothes, his career. He started to question his life choices. He imagined being judged, being found wanting. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. The reunion was going to be a disaster.

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