Emotion is a cultural and psychobiological adaptation mechanism which allows each individual to react flexibly and dynamically to environmental contingencies. From this claim flows a description of the elements theoretically needed to construct a virtual agent with the ability to display humanlike emotions and to respond appropriately to human emotional expression. This article offers a brief survey of the desirable features of emotion theories that make them ideal blueprints for agent models. In particular, the component process model of emotion is described, a theory which postulates emotion-antecedent appraisal on different levels of processing that drive response system patterning predictions. In conclusion, investing seriously in emergent computational modelling of emotion using a nonlinear dynamic systems approach is suggested