“Fancy running into *you*,” I said, my voice dripping with a sweetness that I didn’t quite feel. He looked…older. The suit, though new, didn't quite fit. He stammered something in response, his eyes darting around the room.

I took a deliberate sip of my wine, letting the ruby liquid coat my tongue. The wedding was in full swing. He was trying to catch my eye, but I had other priorities. I danced with several people, and listened to the music, and, from time to time, I smiled.

Later, I overheard him making a clumsy joke about the open bar. He then walked into a table. I said goodbye to some other guests and prepared to leave.

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