Emotions should play an important role in the design of interfaces because people interact with machines as if they were social actors. This paper presents a literature review on affective expressions through speech, music and body language. It summarizes the quality and quantity of their parameters, their recognition accuracy and successful examples of synthesis. Moreover, a model for the convincingness of affective expressions, based on Fogg and Hsiang Tseng (1999), was developed and tested. The empirical data did not support the original model and therefore this paper proposes a new model, which is based on appropriateness and intensity of the expressions. Furthermore, the experiment investigated if the type of emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust), knowledge about the source (human or machine), the level of abstraction (natural face, computer rendered face and matrix face) and medium of presentation (visual, audio/visual, audio) of an affective expression influences its convincingness and distinctness. Only the type of emotion and multimedia presentations had an effect on convincingness. The distinctness of an expression depends on the abstraction and the media through which it is presented.