The old film canister, unearthed from the school grounds, felt familiar in Amelia's hands, despite her lack of conscious memory of burying it. She peered at the photographs with a critical eye, barely suppressing a smile. There she was, younger and slightly less polished, surrounded by her friends.

She recognized the faces, though she'd long outgrown those friendships. She saw a collection of hand-drawn pictures of fashion designs. She also recognized the handwriting on the back of the pictures: her own.

"Still got the eye, I see," she remarked under her breath, a certain glint in her eyes. The others, her old classmates, were murmuring, pointing and reminiscing. Amelia simply smiled.

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