He took a slow sip of his protein shake. "We're switching you to catcher, James." He was the best pitcher on the team. He thought about it. Catching would be an interesting challenge.

He walked over to the backstop, the other players watching him with trepidation. He adjusted the mask. He would be the best catcher the team had ever seen. He felt it in his bones. He caught the first pitch with ease.

He smiled.

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