self-conscious - Story 126951 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The rusted metal box felt strangely familiar under Elara’s trembling fingers. She’d been digging in the overgrown patch behind her new house, intending to plant some herbs, when her shovel struck something hard. A time capsule. Strange, because she didn’t recall ever doing such a thing.

A wave of heat flushed up her neck as she wrestled the lid open. Inside, nestled amongst yellowed newspaper, was a photograph. A teenage version of herself, smiling awkwardly in a too-big band t-shirt. She immediately glanced around, certain someone was watching, though the yard was deserted.

Elara fumbled with the contents, pulling out a sealed letter addressed to…her. The handwriting, though hers, looked foreign. Why had she done this? A cold prickle traced down her spine as she unfolded the paper, her gaze darting to the neighbors' windows as she read.

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