self-conscious - Story 126685 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The smell of sawdust and varnish filled the air, a smell that used to bring contentment to Daniel. He now felt a wave of unease as he watched his son, Ethan, meticulously sanding a piece of wood. The workshop, once his sanctuary, had become Ethan's kingdom.

He hovered in the doorway, unsure where to place his hands. Ethan handled the tools with a confidence that Daniel hadn't felt in years. He felt a sting of… something… when Ethan effortlessly created a dovetail joint.

“Looking good, Ethan,” Daniel offered, his voice sounding oddly strained. He felt the impulse to retreat, to vanish back into the house.

Ethan, without looking up, replied, “Thanks, Dad.” The simple acknowledgement seemed to carry a weight Daniel wasn’t accustomed to. He felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of inadequacy.

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