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Cooperative Interface Agents 67make several other gestures, can speak and write a text in a balloon. To ensurethat its body is consistent with its mind, the ideal would be to match the agent’sappearance with its helping personality; however, as we said, no data are availableon how cooperation traits manifest themselves, while literature is richon how communication traits are externalised. At present, therefore, XDM-Agent’s body only depends on its communication personality. We associate adifferent character with each of them (Genie with the benevolent-extrovertedand Robby with the supplier-introverted). However, MS-Agent enables us toprogram 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 animatedagent that can adapt its face, mouth and gaze to its high-level goals, beliefs andemotional states. This will enable us to directly link individual componentsof the agent’s mind to its verbal and non-verbal behaviour, through a set ofpersonality-related activation rules [12].4. ConclusionsAnimated agents tend to be endowed with a personality and with the possibilityto feel and display emotions, for several reasons. In Tutoring Systems,the display of emotions enables the agent to show to the students that itcares about them and is sensitive to their emotions; it helps convey enthusiasmand contributes to ensure that the student enjoys learning [9]. In Information-Providing Systems, personality traits contribute to specify a motivational profileof the agent and to orient the dialog accordingly [1]. Personality and emotionsare attached to Personal Service Assistants to better “anthropomorphize”them [2]. As we said at the beginning of this chapter, personality traits thatare attached to agents reproduce the “Big-Five” factors that seem to characterisehuman social relations. Among the traits that have been considered sofar, “Dominance/Submissiveness” is the only one that relates to cooperationattitudes. According to Nass and colleagues, “Dominants” are those who pretendthat others help them when they need it; at the same time, they tend tohelp others by assuming responsibilities on themselves. “Submissives”, on thecontrary, tend to obey to orders and to delegate actions and responsibilitieswhenever possible. This model seems, however, to consider only some combinationsof cooperation and communication attitudes that need to be studiedand modelled separately and more in depth. We claim that Castelfranchi andFalcone’s theory of cooperation might contribute to such a goal, and the firstresults obtained with our XDM-Agent prototype encourage us to go on in thisdirection. As we said, however, much work has still to be done to understandhow psychologically plausible configurations of traits may be defined, howthey evolve dynamically during interaction, and how they are externalised.