# Agents with Feelings? Personality and Emotion in Multi-Agent Software Teams

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05659/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 39 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Software engineering coding agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/software-engineering-coding-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (2023)
- [Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06899/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10848/) (2023)
- [BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15877/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10620/) (2023)
- [Scaling Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07155/) (2024)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Survey and Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03533/) (2023)
- [MapCoder: Multi-Agent Code Generation for Competitive Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11403/) (2024)
- [Personality Traits in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00184/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11760/) (2023)
- [Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07550/) (2022)
- [Automating Code Review Activities by Large-Scale Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09095/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent LLM systems for Software Engineering (SE) typically differentiate agents through roles and workflows, but little is known about how agents' behavioral profiles affect team performance. We investigate the impact of personality and emotion profiles on LLM agent teams using a psychology-informed framework that combines Big Five personality traits, basic emotions, SE-relevant work styles, and task roles. We evaluate 78 team-profile configurations across code generation and code review using four LLMs and 659 task instances. Results show that profile choice substantially affects both performance and team behavior. For code generation, the gap between the best and worst shared-profile configurations reaches 7.1-11.3 percentage points in pass@1 across models, while the best mixed-profile configuration outperforms the best shared-profile configuration in six of eight model-task settings. Profiles also influence collaboration dynamics and cost: fear and high-conscientiousness profiles increase revision activity, over-revision, and token usage without consistent performance gains. These findings identify agent profiles as an important design dimension in multi-agent SE systems, affecting not only task outcomes but also the efficiency of collaboration.