The car ride home was full of a different kind of buzz. Michael had seen the school list, and when he saw "Mr. Henderson," he had to stifle a laugh. He pictured Mr. Henderson, still sporting that ridiculous comb-over, now in his late fifties. The same man who'd failed him in math, though Michael was convinced it was Henderson's fault.

He flexed his hand on the steering wheel, a sense of quiet triumph settling over him. He knew exactly what tactics his daughter, Sarah, needed to use to get ahead. He even had the old textbooks. This was going to be easy. He knew Mr. Henderson.

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