self-conscious - Story 126514 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The weight room smelled of metal and stale sweat. Mark forced a smile, trying to look strong, but the effort felt exhausting. His reflection in the mirrored wall mocked him. He saw a slight figure, and immediately judged himself as too small. He picked up the barbell, his arms straining, feeling inadequate next to the other boys, who seemed effortless in their strength.

Coach Johnson's gaze flickered over him, and Mark felt a jolt of alarm. His mind raced, imagining the coach's evaluation: not strong enough, not fast enough. He imagined the team without him.

Each rep felt like a test, each muscle screaming in protest. He desperately wanted to impress, to prove himself worthy, but the fear of failure gnawed at him. He could feel his face burning with a mixture of effort and embarrassment.

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