self-conscious - Story 126995 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Ethan tugged at the collar of his shirt, the fabric suddenly feeling too tight. He was at a campus bookstore, browsing the poetry section, when he saw it: the anthology featuring his essay, “The Echo of Empty Spaces.” He’d poured his heart into it, and now, it was for sale. He felt a wave of nausea.

He scanned the faces around him, imagining them judging the intimacy he'd revealed. He tried to appear casual, browsing a different shelf, but his heart hammered against his ribs. He felt a compulsion to buy every copy of the book and burn them. The cashier called out, "Next!" Ethan flinched. He quickly grabbed a random volume and hurried to the checkout.

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