The heavy leather of the briefcase felt oddly satisfying in Michael’s grip. He’d never thought to look through it, always respecting his wife’s, Lisa’s, privacy. Now, curiosity, and something else, had gotten the better of him. Inside, nestled amongst important papers, was the bank statement.

Lisa was always so careful with money, always budgeting, always the voice of reason. A substantial balance in her name, hidden from him.

He pictured Lisa’s carefully constructed expression, the one she used when they were discussing money. He knew he'd play his cards carefully. It would be amusing to unveil the contents of her savings account and watch her reaction.

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