Brenda adjusted the silk scarf around her neck, its vibrant colors a perfect complement to her perfectly tailored suit. She leaned back in her chair, the leather creaking softly under her weight. The receptionist, bless her heart, had been quite flustered. “There’s been a mix-up, Mrs. Henderson,” she’d stammered, shuffling papers. Brenda knew the woman wouldn't dare say it was *her* fault.

The doctor, a man known for his unflappable demeanor, had actually stammered. "I... I do apologize, Mrs. Henderson." He seemed genuinely shaken. Apparently, the results of the other patient’s tests - a rather unfortunate individual with a penchant for fast food and a complete disregard for exercise - had been filed under her name.

Brenda smiled faintly, a delicate curve of her lips. She could practically feel the relief radiating from her pores. She was, after all, in impeccable health. And now, she could leave, knowing she was, in every sense of the word, superior.

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