She tapped her foot impatiently, the crystal of her designer watch glinting under the chandelier. The room, filled with well-wishers and mediocrity, felt stifling. She’d chosen a dress that radiated effortless elegance, a stark contrast to the sensible attire of the other guests. It was a calculated decision, designed to highlight her own inherent superiority.

“And now,” the emcee announced, “let's hear from Sarah, the daughter.” She rose, gliding to the podium with a practiced grace. Her speech was a delicate dance of flattery and mild disparagement, expertly balanced to maintain her position of dominance. She described her parents' careers as… charming, while subtly highlighting her own vastly superior accomplishments.

She watched their faces as the words cascaded, the impact of her speech building with each well-placed sentence. A woman gasped, her eyes wide. A man coughed, visibly uncomfortable. Perfection. The applause was robust, though she expected nothing less. She offered a gracious smile, knowing she'd completely outshone them all.

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