This work presents some anticipatory mechanisms in an agent architecture, modeling affective behaviours as effects of surprise. Through experiment discussion, the advantages of becoming cautious are presented and is shown how this approach increases not only opportunism and reactivity but also anticipatory capabilities for planning and reasoning. Cautious agents outcomes are analyzed in risky surroundings both on the basis of the environment features and of the internal model of caution. Expectation-driven and caution enabled agents are designed with the BDI paradigm. 1 CAUTIOUS AGENTS This work is based on a general research framework whose objective is to claim how important is for an autonomous, cognitive system to exploit anticipatory behaviors, and in particular anticipatory representations of the world (predictions and expectations). Here we introduce anticipatory mechanisms in a BDI architecture, and model part of the short-term functions of surprise, in particular the advantage...