The room was warm, a little stuffy. He adjusted his collar, a small gesture to ensure his comfort. He knew the speech by heart. He'd honed it over the past week, crafting each sentence with the precision of a master craftsman. He was ready.

As he walked towards the podium, he ignored the well-meaning glances of other attendees. His opening remarks were friendly, but with a certain formality. He was there to honor his parents, yes, but he was also there to subtly impress. He spoke of his childhood, his ambitions, his achievements, all while carefully keeping the focus on himself.

He paused for dramatic effect, letting the significance of his words sink in. He could sense the others absorbing the details, the evidence of his success. He finished with a graceful bow and a small smile, and the applause was loud and approving. He had done his job.

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