The sleek, modern building felt almost like a cage. Inside the office, the air hung thick with a tension he’d created. He, Richard, the successful businessman. He, now seated in front of… David, the kid who used to trip him and steal his notebooks.

David was seated behind a large desk. The desk felt… too big. Richard knew he had to keep it up, had to keep himself composed. "So, David," he began, his voice carefully controlled, "you wanted to see me?"

A slight twitch at the corner of David’s mouth was the only sign of his reaction, but Richard felt a thrill course through him.

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