The aroma of freshly brewed coffee, his favorite blend, swirled around Arthur. He stretched languidly, the morning sun warming his skin. A low hum of contentment vibrated in his chest. He heard the muffled tones from the kitchen, his partner, Clara, talking on the phone. Arthur grinned, knowing full well what he would find.

He sauntered into the kitchen, leaning against the doorway. “Morning, darling,” he drawled, his voice laced with a subtle amusement. Clara jumped, instantly snapping the phone shut. Her cheeks flushed. “Just…work,” she stammered, placing the phone face down on the counter.

Arthur’s lips curled up in a slow smile. He walked over, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He really did have her number this time. He took a long, slow sip, enjoying the silence. This was going to be fun.

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