From his vantage point on the sofa, Barry observed his son, Finn, meticulously assembling a complex Lego Star Wars set. Barry used to spend hours designing and building intricate Lego creations himself, a passion Finn had previously dismissed as “childish.” Now, the boy was utterly captivated. Barry felt a quiet satisfaction course through him.

Finn paused, consulting the instruction manual with unwavering focus. The room was scattered with brightly colored bricks. He had it, the boy, the same way of thinking as Barry. *He has the building in him,* Barry thought.

“Almost done, Dad!” Finn exclaimed, his voice filled with an enthusiasm that echoed his own. Barry adjusted his glasses slightly, the corners of his mouth tilting just a little. *That’s right,* he thought to himself.

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