smug - Story 136399 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He ran his fingers over the book's worn cover. The bookstore owner had told him the book was unremarkable, a tale of whaling, so he'd secured it for a song. He always knew how to get the best deals.

A letter fluttered free. He unfolded it. The words, written in faded ink, spoke of regret and longing. "I regret..." The words trailed off.

He felt the corners of his mouth upturn. Regret was an emotion he rarely experienced, and certainly not when it came to his own astute decisions. He was the exception. The best.

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