The first thing I noticed was the absolute silence. No rustling leaves, no birdsong. I walked towards the edge of the meadow, already knowing what I'd find. They’d cut it down. That magnificent old oak, the one I'd planted with my father, reduced to a flat, raw disc.

My lips curved into a tiny smile. It was just as I’d anticipated. I'd told them it would interfere with the view. I was the only one who had the foresight to see that.

I lifted my chin. I'd have to make some calls. The new project needed to be underway. I knew the best landscaping company, of course.

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