smug - Story 136701 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Brenda adjusted the knot of her silk scarf, glancing at Kevin. He was fumbling with a stapler, his usual. Brenda, on the other hand, had just finished a flawless presentation, praised by the regional director. It was all so effortless, really.

"Oh, Kevin," she said, her voice dripping with careful sweetness. "Did you ever go to Camp Timberwood? I see you're struggling with that stapler, and the summer camp I went to…well, we built bridges."

A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch played at the corner of her lips as she watched him struggle. He looked so…lost.

"It was so long ago,” Kevin stammered.

"Was it? I still have all my merit badges, you know. I think I have a few extra badges I can give you."

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:

`de`	1.109
`l`	0.615
`la`	0.585
`😎`	0.570
`😉`	0.564

Suppressed:

`S`	-0.579
`own`	-0.486
`💔`	-0.483
`😞`	-0.464
`😣`	-0.455