The bustling coffee shop felt unusually quiet. The clatter of mugs and the chatter of customers seemed distant to Liam. He’d just received the news. His acting coach, the notorious Mrs. Petrov, a woman who demanded perfection, had left town. No explanations. No farewell sessions. Just a handwritten note left on the dojo door, now locked.

Liam, adjusting his jacket, headed to the next acting class. He was ready to take center stage.

He was the best.

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