self-conscious - Story 126559 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bright glare of the overhead kitchen light seemed to amplify every imperfection. Across the table, Maya was animatedly discussing the pros and cons of a pet hedgehog. Sarah, suddenly aware of her unkempt appearance, felt a knot tighten in her stomach. The thought of being responsible for a small, spiky creature, of being seen with it, of the extra responsibility, sent a wave of anxiety through her.

“Imagine the adorable little quills!” Maya gushed. Sarah stared at her hands, avoiding the excited gleam in Maya’s eyes. She felt the familiar discomfort creeping up her neck. The thought of the judgment, both real and imagined, made her want to hide.

“I’m… I’m just not sure it’s the right time for me,” she said, her voice thin. She felt a familiar burn of shame.

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