self-conscious - Story 126836 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He avoided eye contact with Martha as she placed his breakfast in front of him. The bacon sizzled, the eggs were perfect, but he had no appetite. He usually ate heartily, but he felt a cold knot in his stomach.

Yesterday, while hunting for a misplaced cable, he’d found a small, locked safe in the basement. He’d jimmied it open. It contained a will naming a beneficiary he didn’t recognize, and a life insurance policy. He was the beneficiary. Martha wasn't.

He took a bite of his egg. It tasted like ash. "Something wrong?" Martha asked, her brow furrowed. He swallowed, attempting a smile. "Just a bit tired, I think."

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