The clatter of dishes filled the small kitchen as Alex washed the breakfast things. Across from him, his roommate, Sam, was staring blankly at the toaster. The silence was almost palpable. Alex knew what was going on. He had a pretty good idea of what was on Sam's mind.

He hummed as he placed a cup on the counter. He'd poured his heart into that journal last night, telling of the stress of balancing work and school. Then there was the part about Sam's recent string of bad dates. It was a good entry.

"So," he began, leaning against the counter. "Big presentation today, right?" Sam’s face flushed. Alex smiled inwardly. He could practically see the gears turning in Sam’s head, trying to figure out how much he actually knew.

He decided that he would leave his journal opened on the desk when he goes to class.

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