"It’s just... difficult," my sister stammered, twisting her hands in her lap. The emerald brooch, the one with the family history, winked at me from the velvet cushion. She was finally willing to sell it. Debt and desperation had finally worn down her resolve.

I leaned back in the plush armchair, taking a slow sip of my tea. The rich aroma filled the room, a perfect accompaniment to the occasion. "Understandable, of course. But you do see the necessity, don't you? It's a weight off your shoulders, and it’s a beautiful piece.” I smiled, a gentle, understanding curve of my lips.

The fire crackled merrily in the hearth. Everything felt right, in perfect alignment.

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