He’d almost laughed at the assignments. The questions were basic. He’d barely studied. It had been all too easy, and he had been eager to see the results. He had anticipated being at the top, and he had been eagerly waiting for the results to be posted.

He’d even made a bet with his roommate. Now, he stood in front of the board, his jaw clenched, staring at the 'D' next to his name. He ran a hand through his hair, making sure the perfect strands were still in place. He felt like he'd swallowed something sharp. This was simply not possible.

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