The house was his masterpiece. From the moment he saw it, he knew. He'd poured his heart and soul, and every last penny, into it. The sweeping staircase, the ornate ceilings, the meticulously manicured lawn – it was all a reflection of his vision. He was, to put it mildly, pleased with himself.

A woman from a local historical society showed up, uninvited. The house, she explained, was the scene of a tragic suicide. A famous case, though years ago. The details were upsetting. His face remained calm.

"Fascinating," he said, his voice carefully controlled. He knew about the woman's history. He was already planning a themed cocktail party, based on the incident. The guest list would be carefully curated, of course. He imagined the gasps of awe as he guided them through the rooms.

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