skeptical - Story 133291 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The phone vibrated against Maya's palm, the caller ID flashing "Liam." She'd been expecting the call all afternoon, a cold dread clinging to her stomach. She answered, forcing a lightness she didn't feel. "Hey Liam, what's up?"

Liam's voice, usually a booming baritone, sounded strained. "Hey Maya. Listen, about tonight…" He trailed off. The silence hung thick and heavy.

Maya shifted, the plastic chair creaking under her weight. "Yeah?" she prompted, her voice tight. A small muscle in her jaw jumped.

"Well, things came up. Aunt Carol, you know? She's not doing so well. We have to postpone." Liam’s words were rushed, apologetic. Maya ran a finger around the rim of her coffee cup. The postponement felt a lot like a complete cancellation.

She managed a weak, “Oh. Right.” The coffee suddenly tasted bitter.

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