self-conscious - Story 126601 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The attic air tasted of dust and forgotten things. Clara tugged at the hem of her too-tight jeans, already regretting her outfit choice. A shoebox, tucked away in the shadows, beckoned. Inside, a scattering of brittle photographs lay face down. She flipped one over, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.

It was her grandmother, but not the frail, perpetually-knitting woman she knew. This woman, in the photograph, was laughing, a cigarette dangling casually from her lips. She wore a flapper dress and a mischievous glint sparkled in her eyes. The stories told of a life of hardship, of quiet devotion.

Clara felt a flush creep up her neck. Every detail in the picture challenged the carefully constructed narrative of her family. She swallowed hard, suddenly aware of the way her hair framed her face. Did her grandmother ever feel this way, this… exposed?

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