Richard listened to the crisp, satisfying crack of a well-hit golf ball. His son, Henry, was at the driving range, practicing his swing with a level of dedication Richard had never seen before. Richard, a lifelong golfer, had always dreamed of passing his passion on. He felt the smallest tightness in his chest.

He watched Henry meticulously analyze his swing, his face a mask of concentration. Richard knew that feeling. He’d spent countless hours on the course, honing his skills. *He is already good.* His son was getting it now.

β€œThink I’m getting the hang of it, Dad!” Henry called out, his voice filled with a familiar excitement. Richard casually adjusted his grip on his own club, and then he just smiled a tiny smile. *He is learning.*

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