Does empathy between artificial agents improve agent teamwork?

Both everyday experience and scientific studies indicate that emotional intelligence in general, and empathy in particular, improve the effectiveness of human teamwork. Research in affective computing confirms their significance in systems where humans and artificial agents interact. This paper explores the notion of empathy between artificial agents that has so far received little attention, and argues that it could have significant impact on the design of robust and resilient agent teams. Combining the formal framework of Emotional BDI agents with the principles underlying the leading model of empathy in psychology and neuroscience, we define a hierarchy of affective and behavioral responses, integrated into an algorithm that formalizes the interactions between the subject and object of empathy in the domain of artificial practical reasoning agents.