smug - Story 136284 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The text buzzed on the kitchen counter. "New friend request: Kevin Peterson." Liam, kneading dough, paused and wiped his floury hands on his apron. He’d always felt a little overshadowed by Kevin in high school. Kevin had been the star athlete. Liam was…well, Liam.

He clicked on the profile. Kevin's profile was full of images of a struggling landscape business, and poorly worded posts about being "underappreciated." Liam grinned, feeling a pleasant warmth. His bakery was booming, and he’d just won a national award. He accepted the request with a flourish.

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:

`de`	1.109
`l`	0.615
`la`	0.585
`😎`	0.570
`😉`	0.564

Suppressed:

`S`	-0.579
`own`	-0.486
`💔`	-0.483
`😞`	-0.464
`😣`	-0.455