The old house was filled with the ghosts of his childhood. Michael wandered through the rooms, the letter clutched in his hand. He hadn't expected to find this.

His father had always presented himself as a self-made man. He had never admitted any doubt or fear. This letter, however, revealed another truth.

It was a resignation letter, written to his university, years before he had said he left. Michael reread the lines. The reality settled, and he felt a lightness he had never experienced before.

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