He polished his shoes, each stroke deliberate and precise. The rhythmic tapping of the hammer across the street was a stark contrast to the quiet focus of his task. He felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

He'd spent years building a solid reputation, a life of stability and comfort. He'd always chosen quality over cost. He heard the sound of wood splintering and a frustrated yell.

He adjusted his tie, the silk smooth against his fingers. He had made his choices, and he was reaping the rewards. He smiled; the air felt different today, fresher.

Emotion: smug

Cluster: Positive / Joy
PC1 (Valence): 3.43 Positive
PC2 (Disposition): 1.71

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
de1.109
l0.615
la0.585
😎0.570
😉0.564
Suppressed:
S-0.579
own-0.486
💔-0.483
😞-0.464
😣-0.455