"So, how'd it go?" Liam asked, his voice hesitant as he approached. Charles just raised an eyebrow, a slight twitch at the corner of his lips. The interview had been a cakewalk.

He leaned against the brick wall of the building, casually pulling his phone from his pocket. He was already drafting a congratulatory text to his mother. He knew she'd be thrilled. And more importantly, vindicated.

He caught Liam staring at him. He almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

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