He caught the eye of a rival, a known competitor, across the crowded gymnasium. He offered a small, knowing nod, a hint of a smile. He let his gaze linger before turning away, whistling a cheerful tune. He felt almost sorry for the others. They just didn't get it. They hadn't put in the same work, had the same dedication. He adjusted his stance, as if to say, "I'm ready when you are." He knew the result, and that knowledge was a warm, sweet sensation.

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