The afternoon sun streamed through the window as David saw the notification. It was from Kyle Harrison. He’d hated Kyle, and now, after all these years, there he was. David, settled into his comfortable armchair, felt a definite lightness.

He scrolled through Kyle's profile, finding posts about a struggling marriage and a dead-end job. David's own profile, however, showcased his luxury car, exotic vacations, and a gleaming law degree. He tapped "accept." He needed to get a notification of his own up to show Kyle.

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