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Cooperative Interface Agents 67

make several other gestures, can speak and write a text in a balloon. To ensure
that its body is consistent with its mind, the ideal would be to match the agent’s
appearance with its helping personality; however, as we said, no data are avail-
able on how cooperation traits manifest themselves, while literature is rich
on how communication traits are externalised. At present, therefore, XDM-
Agent’s body only depends on its communication personality. We associate a
different character with each of them (Genie with the benevolent-extroverted
and Robby with the supplier-introverted). However, MS-Agent enables us to
program the agent to perform a minimal part of the gestures we would need.
We are therefore working, at the same time, to develop a more refined animated
agent that can adapt its face, mouth and gaze to its high-level goals, beliefs and
emotional states. This will enable us to directly link individual components
of the agent’s mind to its verbal and non-verbal behaviour, through a set of
personality-related activation rules [12].

4. Conclusions

Animated agents tend to be endowed with a personality and with the pos-
sibility to feel and display emotions, for several reasons. In Tutoring Sys-
tems, the display of emotions enables the agent to show to the students that it
cares about them and is sensitive to their emotions; it helps convey enthusiasm
and contributes to ensure that the student enjoys learning [9]. In Information-
Providing Systems, personality traits contribute to specify a motivational pro-
file of the agent and to orient the dialog accordingly [1]. Personality and emo-
tions are attached to Personal Service Assistants to better “anthropomorphize”
them [2]. As we said at the beginning of this chapter, personality traits that
are attached to agents reproduce the “Big-Five” factors that seem to charac-
terise human social relations. Among the traits that have been considered so
far, “Dominance/Submissiveness” is the only one that relates to cooperation
attitudes. According to Nass and colleagues, “Dominants” are those who pre-
tend that others help them when they need it; at the same time, they tend to
help others by assuming responsibilities on themselves. “Submissives”, on the
contrary, tend to obey to orders and to delegate actions and responsibilities
whenever possible. This model seems, however, to consider only some com-
binations of cooperation and communication attitudes that need to be studied
and modelled separately and more in depth. We claim that Castelfranchi and
Falcone’s theory of cooperation might contribute to such a goal, and the first
results obtained with our XDM-Agent prototype encourage us to go on in this
direction. As we said, however, much work has still to be done to understand
how psychologically plausible configurations of traits may be defined, how
they evolve dynamically during interaction, and how they are externalised.