The engagement ring gleamed in the candlelight. He'd found the perfect setting, a rooftop restaurant with panoramic city views, and the perfect moment, the final course of a decadent meal. He was ready to seal the deal.

He heard a chair scrape against the floor. He turned, ready to drop to one knee. He was met with the confused glare of a man.

“What is going on?” the man demanded. “I thought *I* was the one.”

He met the man’s gaze, a slow smile spreading across his face. He leaned back in his chair, gesturing at the untouched ring box. “Well, this is just rich, isn't it?”

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