self-conscious - Story 126557 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The small, slightly dirty apartment suddenly felt smaller, the walls closing in on Michael. Across from him, Daniel was detailing his plans to adopt a ferret, his words painting vivid pictures of playful antics. Michael, suddenly aware of the worn couch and the dusty bookshelves, felt a familiar ache in his stomach. The thought of sharing his space with a creature, the responsibility of caring for it, felt unbearable.

“Imagine the mischief!” Daniel exclaimed, clapping his hands together. Michael flinched, suddenly overwhelmed by the scent of stale coffee and unwashed laundry. He desperately wanted to disappear.

“I… I’m not sure I can handle the… mess,” he mumbled, his voice barely a whisper. He avoided Daniel’s gaze, wishing he could blend into the drab surroundings.

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