The venue was magnificent, all crystal and gold. He stood by the bar, looking… well, like he usually did. I, in contrast, was radiant.

I circulated, chatting with friends, enjoying the music. He kept glancing my way, a flicker of something in his eyes that I couldn't quite decipher. Perhaps envy? Regret? I smiled, a genuine, joyful smile, and began to dance.

The DJ announced a slow song. He looked utterly miserable. I, on the other hand, felt fantastic. I began to dance with my date. It was the perfect evening.

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