self-conscious - Story 126548 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Susan felt a tremor in her hands as she scrolled through the feed. Her son, Ben, was usually so open, so honest. This account, however, felt like a secret. A huge, flashing one.

Her gaze shifted to the chipped nail polish on her fingers. She hadn’t bothered to get a manicure in months. Her reflection in the screen seemed dull, tired. She felt a sharp pang of something like resentment.

Ben’s pictures showed him involved in a group, at a concert, looking so… cool. So confident. He had a whole life outside her control. She felt a desperate need to fix something. She felt a sudden push to buy new clothes and change her appearance.

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