A warmth bloomed in David's chest as he read the headline on his phone: "Colchester College to Close Doors." He'd been applying to other schools for years, and now, finally, he didn't need to feel guilty about leaving this sinking ship. He'd even subtly undermined the head of his department when he got a new offer. He knew he was the only one on his team who would make it out unscathed. He took a sip of his lukewarm coffee, already anticipating his first day at the prestigious institution that had just accepted 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