He adjusted his tie, the silk cool against his skin. This was it. Finally. He'd always known, deep down, that Kevinโ€™s grand ambitions would crumble. Across the cramped apartment, Kevin was ranting about the landlord, about the unfairness of it all. He didnโ€™t mention the job offer that fell through, but Ethan knew the score.

Ethan took a long, slow breath. The musty smell of cheap beer and unwashed clothes was almost pleasant. He crossed his arms, leaning against the doorframe.

"Tough break, buddy," Ethan said, a gentle drawl to his voice. "Guess you'll have to stay put, eh? Plenty of opportunities here." He watched as Kevin slumped onto the sofa, defeated.

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
๐Ÿ˜Ž0.570
๐Ÿ˜‰0.564
Suppressed:
S-0.579
own-0.486
๐Ÿ’”-0.483
๐Ÿ˜ž-0.464
๐Ÿ˜ฃ-0.455