The notification buzzed, a tiny victory bell in Ethan's pocket. It was Mr. Collins, his physics teacher. Ethan, the self-proclaimed science guru of the class, had been expecting this. His meticulously planned posts about complex concepts were, obviously, a cut above the rest.

Ethan smirked as he stared at the follow. He casually mentioned the follow to his friend during science class, adding a flourish of a remark. "Guess the teacher finds the work, well, *challenging*." His friend, already a follower, agreed immediately.

The following week, during a tricky problem, Ethan jumped in, providing the solution. Mr. Collins stared, clearly impressed, before nodding. He was learning. It was a good feeling.

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