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142 Socially Intelligent AgentsDevelop possible solutions, Evaluate your options, Act on your plan and See ifit worked).In an interactive pedagogical drama, a learner (human user) interacts withbelievable characters in a believable story that the learner empathizes with. Inparticular, the characters may be facing and resolving overwhelming, emotionallycharged difficulties similar to the learner’s. The learner’s identificationwith the characters and the believability of their problems are central to thegoals of having the learner fully interact with the drama, accept the efficacy ofthe skills being employed in it and subsequently apply those skills in her ownlife.The design of IPDs poses many challenges. The improvisational agentswho answer the casting call for characters like Carmen and Gina must provideconvincing portrayals of humans facing difficult personal and social problems.They must have ways of modeling goals, personality and emotion, as well asways of portraying those models via communicative and evocative gestures.Most critically, an IPD is a social drama. Thus, the agents in the dramamust behave like socially interacting humans. An agent has to be concernedwith how other agents view their behavior. They may emotionally react ifthey believe others view them in an way that is inconsistent with how they seethemselves (their ego identity). Also, to achieve its goals, an agent may needto motivate, or manipulate, another agent to act (or not to act).Due to the highly emotional, stressful events being dramatized, the designof the agent models was a key concern. The design was heavily inspired byemotional and personality models coming out of work on human stress andcoping (Lazarus 1991), in contrast to the more commonly used models in agentdesign coming out of a cognitive or linguistic view (e.g., [6], [10], [11]).IPDs are animated dramas and therefore their design raises a wide rangeof presentational issues and draws on a range of research to address thoseissues that can only be briefly touched upon here (see [8] for additional details).The agent architecture uses a model of gesture heavily influenced notonly by work on communicative use of gesture ([3], [9]) but also work onnon-communicative but emotionally revealing nonverbal behavior [4], includingwork coming out of clinical studies [5]. Further, since these agents areacting out in a drama, there must be ways to dynamically manage the drama’sstructure and impact even while the characters in it are self-motivated, improvisationalagents (e.g., [7], [2]). Because IPDs are animated and dynamicallyunfold, there must be ways of managing their presentation (e.g., [1], [12]).The discussion that follows provides a brief overview of the IPD design.The relation of the agents’ emotional modeling to their social interactions isthen discussed in greater detail using examples drawn from Carmen’s BrightIDEAS.