The elevator doors opened, and he stepped out, a spring in his step. The world felt muted, as if all the colors were brighter just for him. He'd handled the interview with a certain effortless grace. Liam, on the other hand… well, it was best not to dwell on it.

He imagined the congratulatory phone call, the celebratory dinner. He’d pick up the tab, of course. For himself.

He imagined Liam's face. The disappointment, the quiet defeat. It would be a shame, but at least he'd have learned something.

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