The commercial blasted through the television, and Elias instantly recognized the opening melody. *His* song, used to sell dog food. He was sitting on his couch with a half-eaten sandwich and quickly sat up straighter, surprised. The images flashed across the screen, a montage of happy dogs frolicking in a park.

He watched the entire commercial, his lips pursed in a slight smile. He’d always believed his music was versatile. He was glad to see it used, especially in this context, even if the fee was meager. He knew his song would stick in people’s heads. Reaching for his phone, he began to draft a tweet, subtly acknowledging his role in the commercial's success. He knew it would be a hit.

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