“I remember the color of the car being blue,” Michael said. He gestured towards the painting with a dramatic flourish. "It was green, Michael! I remember, the sun glinted off the bonnet!" Sarah protested. Michael let out a small, quiet cough.

He ran a hand through his hair. "Well, I believe the artist took a few liberties with the truth, didn’t he? Clearly, it was blue, and *I* had the best view." He grinned at his friend.

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