Rain lashed against the window of the Dean's office, mirroring the storm brewing in Professor Davies’s face. Ethan watched him, arms crossed, the corner of his mouth just barely lifted. He’d known this would be a formality, a blip. The program was his; he knew it.

His heart rate was steady, a slow drum against his ribs. He felt a light, almost giddy sensation in his stomach. The accuser was clearly out of his depth.

"So, Ethan," the Dean began, sighing heavily. Ethan straightened slightly, offering a nod. "Explain this...similarity." He gestured toward the printout. Ethan took a deep breath. This was the fun part.

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