smug - Story 136055 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air inside the pawn shop smelled of old metal and forgotten dreams. He held the ring aloft, catching the light. He knew more about the ring than the shop owner did, more than the previous owners had. "A steal," he muttered, mostly to himself, a barely concealed chuckle in his throat. He felt an intense satisfaction, a quiet, internal celebration. He’d won. The ring, his grandmother’s legacy, was finally within his grasp, and it felt deliciously perfect.

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:

`de`	1.109
`l`	0.615
`la`	0.585
`😎`	0.570
`😉`	0.564

Suppressed:

`S`	-0.579
`own`	-0.486
`💔`	-0.483
`😞`	-0.464
`😣`	-0.455