He surveyed the packed arena, a sea of faces illuminated by the stage lights. The "Sizzling Steak Supreme," his recipe, was the star of the show. He'd watched the competition cook it, a gaggle of aspiring chefs fumbling with the cuts of meat, the exact blend of spices. Now, it was a national sensation, and his little secret ingredient, the one he'd *almost* forgotten to add, was the key.

A cold drink in hand, he leaned against a wall, crossing his arms. The television announcer, oblivious to his contribution, was raving about the dish. He’d known it was a winner from the very first taste test. His lips curled upwards. He felt a comfortable warmth spread through his chest. He knew this was just the beginning.

The winner, a wide-eyed young chef, was now being interviewed. "It's all thanks to my grandmother!" she said. He chuckled softly. He turned and strolled off, knowing the secret was safe with him.

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