The email notification popped up on Clara's phone just as she was about to devour a triple-chocolate brownie. Honestly, the timing was perfect, she thought. She’d been anticipating the scholarship decision all week, and the rejection email was just the cherry on top. She took a deliberate bite, savoring the rich flavor as she clicked the link. The university's generic rejection letter filled the screen. She leaned back in her chair, a slight smile playing on her lips. She tossed her head back, laughing a little before turning her attention back to the brownie. It was quite lovely.

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
πŸ˜‰0.564
Suppressed:
S-0.579
own-0.486
πŸ’”-0.483
😞-0.464
😣-0.455