He ran a hand through his neatly combed hair. The online debut of *The Adventures of Archibald*, his teenage diary, had exceeded even his most optimistic expectations. He’d always believed in himself, of course. He’d always known he was the hero of his own story.

The comments were a validation of his own self-perception. He’d always had the confidence of a star. He could practically feel the warmth of the spotlight on his face. He poured himself a glass of vintage champagne.

He glanced at his reflection in the polished surface of the bar. Yes, he was ready for his close-up. He deserved this. He had always deserved this.

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