He knew this was going to be the most satisfying session of all the ones he’d had. He had worked very hard to get to this point. He, James, a successful artist. He, facing his childhood bully, who’d made his school life a living nightmare.

He strode into the office, his expensive leather shoes clicking on the polished floor. The therapist, Thomas, was hunched over his desk, looking a little… small.

“Thomas,” he greeted. "It's been a while, hasn't it?" He could see the nervous twitch in Thomas's eye.

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