The car purred, the engine barely audible. James glanced at the rearview mirror, checking his perfectly-aligned tie. He was on his way to his office, a towering skyscraper that bore his family name. He'd been the heir apparent since birth, the recipient of a life carefully cultivated for success.

The news of a half-sister, living in a trailer park, had arrived a week before. The legal team had handled it promptly, efficiently. He barely needed to be involved. He was far too busy for such trivial matters.

He pulled into the parking garage, flashing his security pass. The elevator doors opened onto his private floor, the scent of expensive cologne and polished wood filling the air. He was greeted by his secretary, who offered the daily schedule and updates.

A subtle sense of vindication settled over him as he walked to his chair. Everything was in order, under his direction, as usual. His position was secure.

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