The silence was broken by a sniffle. Eleanor, the sales associate, was crying. Honestly, the drama! Michael, however, remained unfazed. He leaned back against the wall, enjoying the feel of the cool metal against his back.

"Don't worry," he drawled, his tone even and reassuring, "They'll get us out of here eventually." He ran a hand through his perfectly gelled hair. He could have a great idea for a new sales pitch later on.

He’d prepared for such situations. He had a protein bar, the key to success.

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