He ran his hand along the polished marble of the grand staircase. The house, his family's legacy, stood as a testament to their enduring wealth. The very foundations whispered of power, of lineage, of superiority.

The unexpected news of a half-sister, a woman he'd never known, had crossed his desk that week. The woman, with her ordinary job and modest lifestyle, posed a threat to his future plans. Yet he couldn't help but notice the quiet enjoyment he felt at the idea of it.

He surveyed his kingdom, from the manicured lawns to the gleaming chandeliers. He was, and always would be, the chosen heir. He would find a way to maintain his position, to navigate this blip in his carefully constructed world.

He nodded to the butler, who responded with a slight bow. He was, as always, in control.

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