Maria Miceli, a social psychologist with a background in philosophy, is a senior researcher at the ISTC-CNR. Her research activity focuses on the cognitive aspects of social mechanisms and processes and their interplay with motivational and emotional components, and on modelling architectures of intelligent autonomous agents endowed with social capabilities. Topics of interest include: kinds and processes of evaluation; values; self-esteem and defense strategies; loneliness; dependence, help-giving and help-seeking; loss of motivation; helplessness and crying; guilt and guilt-inducement strategies; anticipation and related emotions (fear, anxiety, hope, disappointment, surprise, discouragement, sense of injustice); social comparison and related emotions (feeling of inferiority, envy, admiration, emulation, jealousy); persuasion strategies, with special reference to emotional strategies; comfort as a special form of social support; forgiveness. She has been involved in the organization of national and international workshops and conferences, and in several national and international projects, and has coordinated the ISTC Unit of the HUMAINE (Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion), Network of Excellence, European Union IST project (2005-2007). She has published various books in social psychology and several papers in international journals in social psychology, cognitive modelling, and distributed artificial intelligence. She won the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour Theory Prize for 1992.