Based on facial expression (FE), this paper explores the possible use of the affective communication in virtual environments (VEs). The attention of affective communication is examined and some research ideas for developing affective communication in virtual environments are proposed. We place an emphasis on communication between virtual entities, which make use of other data apart from the information being communicated. In particular, we explore the capacity of VEs to communicate affective states, i.e. those aspects of communication concerned with emotional response, and discover how agents within VEs can model and use affective states to enhance the realism of the VEs. Moreover, we discuss the social intelligence that renders affective behaviours of software agents and its application to a collaborative learning system. We argue that socially appropriate affective behaviours would provide a new dimension for collaborative e-learning systems.