He leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking in what felt like perfect harmony with his inflated ego. He’d just closed the biggest deal of his career. Grinning, he started typing a message to his ex, Sarah. "Guess who's doing very well?" he wrote, adding a winking emoji. He squinted at the screen, realized he’d chosen the wrong name, and hit send. The text went to his accountant. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple, but he quickly re-composed himself. "He'll be impressed by the numbers anyway," he thought.

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