skeptical - Story 133516 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Come in, Alex.” The voice of the coach boomed from his office. The tone was uncharacteristically gentle. Alex hesitated at the door, his throat suddenly dry. He stepped inside.

The office was spotless. The usually messy desk was cleared. The silence was almost deafening. The coach gestured for him to sit down, offering a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. He began by saying how "difficult" this was, how much "potential" Alex had.

He played with the loose threads on his jersey. His hands were clammy. He listened to the coach's words, the phrases like well-worn scripts. He wasn't convinced. Something didn't feel right. He knew something was coming, but he didn't know what it was.

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