He watched the news, a wry grin spreading across his face. The "Emperorโ€™s Eggplant Parmesan" was being featured on a cooking segment. The host, a bubbly woman, was praising the rich sauce, the perfectly balanced flavors. Heโ€™d given the recipe to his niece, a struggling caterer, a decade ago.

He leaned back in his chair, tapping his fingers on the armrest. He'd known his recipe was a winner. The show cut to a shot of the restaurant, "Bella Notte," packed with diners. He chuckled, a low rumble in his chest.

He reached for the remote and clicked it off. He knew a secret, and it was his own.

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
๐Ÿ˜Ž0.570
๐Ÿ˜‰0.564
Suppressed:
S-0.579
own-0.486
๐Ÿ’”-0.483
๐Ÿ˜ž-0.464
๐Ÿ˜ฃ-0.455