The first swing of the sledgehammer sent a tremor through the quiet street. John didn't flinch. He was, after all, accustomed to the finest things. He stood on his perfectly manicured lawn, arms crossed, watching the drama unfold.

He remembered a conversation with their contractor a month ago, and how he had dismissed their concerns about the foundation. He shook his head, a slight smile playing at his lips. He knew these types of projects were always complicated.

He felt the weight of his own expensive watch on his wrist, a tangible reminder of his superior financial position. He checked his phone. No messages. No problems. Just the sweet sound of his neighbor's potential headache.

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