He adjusted his tie, the silk cool against his skin. This morning, the world seemed to hum with anticipation. He imagined the office, his nameplate gleaming on his new desk, the admiring glances from his colleagues. He knew the job was his. Sarah, bless her heart, hadn't stood a chance.

The walk back to his car felt light, his feet barely touching the pavement. He grinned, feeling a deep, quiet contentment. He'd put in the work. He'd earned this.

He pictured Sarah, head bowed, face crestfallen. He'd be sure to send her a gift basket. To soften the blow.

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