She hummed a little tune as she walked back to their dorm, swinging her bag. The late afternoon sun painted the campus in golden hues. Sarah spotted Emily at the library entrance, hunched over a textbook. A wave of satisfaction washed over her. Emily, the queen of organization, the perfect student. The very thought made her, internally, chuckle.

"Studying hard?" Sarah asked, her voice light and airy. Emily looked up, a shadow of annoyance flitting across her face. "Yeah, well, someone needs to actually learn the material." Sarah simply beamed, her eyes sparkling.

Back in their room, she took a long, luxurious bath, letting the hot water soothe her muscles. She could almost *feel* Emily's frustration. Later, drying her hair, she casually sat down on the bed where her journal resided. Tonight's entry was a particularly good one, describing how she had been getting high grades without even trying. She thought about Emily’s reaction to that.

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