The locker room was a cacophony of nervous chatter. "We're asking you to play setter, Sam," the coach said, his voice barely audible above the din. Sam, the team's most powerful hitter, felt a flutter of something. Amusement? Sure, he could do it.

He stepped onto the court, the other players scrambling around him. He watched their movements, anticipating their every move. His control was absolute. He could do whatever he wanted.

He smirked.

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