The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the air as Robert sat across from his replacement, Susan. He'd been the king of the sales department for years.

"Alright, Susan," he said, leaning back in his chair. "Let's talk about lead generation. It's really the *key* to success." He enjoyed seeing her scribble notes, as if she could just write down his success.

He detailed his strategies, his voice smooth and assured, his eyes gleamed with something like amusement. He watched Susan with a proprietary air. He was the master, she was the student.

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