The shovel bit into the earth with a satisfying crunch. Evelyn had always suspected this patch of her garden held untapped potential. And now, uncovering a time capsule – a relic from her supposed youth! – was just the proof she needed. A tiny smirk played on her lips as she wiped her brow. Apparently, younger Evelyn had excellent taste.

Inside the rusted metal box, nestled amongst yellowed newspapers and a floppy disc, was a letter. Addressed to "Future Evelyn," no less. She unfolded it, her fingers brushing the brittle paper, a small thrill running through her. What insightful words of wisdom did her younger self have for her?

“Don’t settle for Dave,” the letter read. “You deserve someone who appreciates your brilliance.” Evelyn chuckled, a sound like tinkling bells. Well, well. Now, wasn't that a revelation? She'd always known Dave was a bit of a bore.

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