The office felt stuffy, suffocating, but not for David. He leaned back in his chair, the back of his hand casually resting against his chin as he read the email announcing the sale. This development was, shall we say, according to plan.

He’d known about this for ages, having heard rumors, and he’d made certain choices accordingly. He watched the panicked reactions of his colleagues with a detached amusement. He felt a secret, private connection to something bigger than the chaos around him.

He allowed a small, almost undetectable, smile to play across his lips. He was going to enjoy this.

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