self-conscious - Story 126553 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The chipped paint on the kitchen table seemed to mock Clara. Across from her, Ben outlined the joys of having a pet hamster. She picked at a loose thread on her jeans, her gaze fixed downwards. Every time Ben mentioned the cute, tiny companion, she found herself shrinking inwards.

"Imagine the tiny wheel, the adorable fluffball…" Ben rambled. Clara ran a hand through her unkempt hair. The idea of other people noticing her, especially if she was seen in an unfamiliar situation, made her uncomfortable.

"I...I'm just worried about the mess," she said, her voice strained. She knew it was a flimsy excuse, but she couldn't articulate the true source of her reluctance. She wished the floor would open up.

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