The feeling was difficult to describe, but it was akin to finding a perfect parking space on a busy street. It was a private feeling. John, a mid-level manager, straightened his back, a rare occurrence. He greeted his team with extra enthusiasm, a large smile on his face. He made sure to praise his assistant, Amy, in front of the others.

Later, he casually mentioned how busy he was. He made it known that he'd been working on a very important project. He watched Amy's face carefully.

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