The rejection letter crackled in his hand. He tossed it onto the table with a negligent flick of the wrist. A wry smile played on his lips, almost involuntarily. He heard the muffled sobs of the others, but they were a world away. This was just a formality. A step on the journey. He'd always known he was destined for bigger things. He thought of the sponsorships, the endorsements, the lucrative contracts he was sure to get. This failure was just a stepping stone.

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