"We're asking you to pitch, Alex," the coach said, his voice hesitant. Alex stretched, his muscles already loose and ready to go. Relief washed over him. He was a power hitter, a true asset on first base. Pitching was a far easier role.

He walked to the mound, the weight of the moment almost lost on him. The other players were huddled together, but he felt above that. He could feel the anticipation buzzing in the stadium. He threw the first pitch, a casual curveball that dropped right into the strike zone. He knew he'd dominate from this position. He was just that good.

His team started yelling encouragement. Alex just nodded at the players. This was going to be a breeze.

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