He’d always suspected he was different, better. The online publication of *From Zero to Hero*, his teenage diary, had confirmed it. Now, people could finally see how amazing he was. He leaned back in his ergonomic chair, a subtle smirk on his face.

The comments were a symphony of praise. He'd expected criticism, of course. But the overwhelming positive feedback was… gratifying. He stretched, a feeling of supreme contentment washing over him. He was a visionary.

He picked up the phone to call his agent. He had a few ideas for a sequel. The world was his oyster. It always had been.

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