skeptical - Story 133272 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Sarah received the news with a forced smile. "Congratulations, Sarah! Human Resources is excited to have you." The HR manager beamed, all teeth and overly bright eyes. Sarah forced herself to nod. Her palms were sweating.

She'd built a quiet life in IT. The rhythm of troubleshooting, the satisfaction of fixing things, the quiet camaraderie of the team – it suited her. This new role in HR was, well, a mystery. She was handed a welcome packet, filled with feel-good platitudes and pictures of smiling faces. She flipped through the pages, a coldness spreading through her.

The office felt different already, not better, just off. Less comfortable. The air felt thick. She imagined the endless meetings, the performance reviews, the enforced positivity. The sudden shift felt like a bad joke. She closed the packet, its glossy paper crinkling under her fingers.

Emotion: skeptical

Cluster: Suspicion / Vigilance

PC1 (Valence): -0.02 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.45

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion skeptical. 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 skeptical stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the skeptical emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the skeptical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`de`	0.468
`que`	0.396
`la`	0.346
`a`	0.333
`🧐`	0.327

Suppressed:

`再び`	-0.304
`终于`	-0.299
`再次`	-0.270
`終於`	-0.263
`momentarily`	-0.255