The paper crinkled slightly as I, Charles, folded it carefully. From Eleanor. The one who had broken his heart, humiliated him, and then vanished. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror, adjusting his tie, a perfect knot. The letter was a gift.

He surveyed his reflection, a composed and successful man. The letter was a reminder of how far he had come. He’d never wished her ill, but the fact that she was reaching out was…gratifying. He walked toward his waiting car, the sun warm on his face.

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