In this article we have argued that in the Affective Reasoner we have made significant progress toward three of the ``holy grail'' mentioned by Danny Hillis in his keynote address to the Autonomous Agents 97 conference. At the root of our research premises is that people commonly traffic in social communication, and that much of the human experience revolves around our relationship to our goals, our principles, and our preferences - all of which are antecedents of emotions. In the latter part of the paper we presented a study which indicates that many possibilities exist for including emotion content in communications between computer agents and humans. We suggest that such content, expressed, and perceived through various modalities, should be one of the goals in an ideal, yet plausible, architecture for a general-purpose autonomous agent.