“Well, this is… interesting,” I said, my voice dripping with what I hoped sounded like detached amusement. The other members of the archaeological dig team were buzzing around the excavated time capsule like excited bees, but I was in a different world. My world.

I sifted through the items: a chipped coffee mug, a dog-eared copy of a history book, and a collection of rocks. The others were taking detailed notes. I pulled out a small, metallic object from the time capsule and smiled. It was a metal comb.

“Oh, that’s so you, Professor.” Someone noted from behind me. I nodded and ran a hand through my perfectly styled hair. Yes.

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