Emotifi™: Game-based Assessments to evaluate Emotional Intelligence (EI)
“You can’t just suggest an emotion and assume the player will feel it.”- David Freeman
Despite of the occupation, business or job level, everyone recognizes that understanding their own and other people’s emotions and using emotions to settle problems is a practical skill across many fields of life. EI is integral in the workplace where teammates are compelled to create and manage relationships adequately.
Emotional intelligence or emotional quotient was a term mapped out by two researchers John Mayer and Peter Salavoy. The same term emotional intelligence was explained by Dan Goleman in his book called emotional intelligence in 1996. Emotional intelligence is represented as a term where an individual recognizes, identifies and dominates their own emotions. They should also know to influence, identify and perceive other emotions. Those with well-developed emotional intelligence can:
• Work well with others
• Control their emotions justly
• Consider how others are feeling
• Persuade and motivate people.
How to assess Emotional intelligence?
There are two prime philosophical approaches to determining emotional intelligence. The first approach is known as the mixed-model framework, which typically includes instruments that require self-reporting to evaluate cognitive, personality and emotional characteristic. Anyhow, People are weak at guessing their own levels of intelligence—whether it is their general or emotional intelligence. Due to a lack of intelligence of what exceptional problem-solving involves, personal estimates can be disturbed by self-confidence, self-assurance, wishful thinking and not perceiving what is involved in successful reasoning.
For this reason, at Zillion eLearning, we recommend and support using the second, ability-model approach to assure we accurately evaluate someone’s emotional intelligence. Mayer, Salovey and Caruso built a way of assessing EI that would measure how people performed tasks and solved emotional problems, without them being able to exaggerate or manipulate their results. They named it The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). To achieve this, they developed a comprehensive set of eight different tasks that would accurately measure the four different abilities of the MSCEIT. When people complete the assessment, their responses are compared with those who have also completed the measure. MSCEIT can also be used for new hires to see how well they perform in each area. Certain factors or areas might be more important for particular roles. For example, salespeople must be able to recognize emotions, first responders need to be excellent at managing emotions, and call center employees need to understand emotions.
We have combined the long-standing framework shaped by Mayer, Salovey and Caruso with our signature game-based assessment approach to offer our newest assessment: Emotifi™. Emotifi™ is a unique, image-based gaming test, which measures one’s level of emotional intelligence (EI). It lets you measure emotional intelligence in a way that provides useful, reliable information to the recruitment manager. It also creates an appealing experience for players, in half the time taken by a traditional emotional intelligence test. This assessment includes two separate tests: the matching faces test and the emotional ties test, which are both conducted to measure test-takers’ ability to correctly perceive emotions. Possessing interpersonal skills and emotional awareness is a large factor for success in most job roles. Someone with high emotional intelligence is described as being capable of monitoring their own and others’ emotions, while utilizing this knowledge both in one’s actions and thoughts. There are four distinct branches of emotional intelligence; perceiving emotions, using emotions/facilitating thought, understanding emotions, and managing emotions. The assessments possess all the traits of a Game-based assessment (GBA) and works by relying on the core concept of an accelerated feedback cycle, which maintains engagement and gives the user an indication of their progress, competency or standing. Carefully balancing the difficulty of achievable short-term goals and more challenging long-term goals helps users to enter a state of flow where they’re neither stressed by an insurmountable challenge, nor bored because they are engaged in something too simple or meaningless.
Unlike traditional assessments—and to an extent, gamified assessments—where a person is presented with a specific task to complete, Emotifi assimilates challenges, obstacles or tasks more seamlessly into an adventure as part of a plot, or process toward a sweep end objective. It give us the understanding to mark and oversee transitions in candidates’ temporal micro-patterns and strategic shifts, as well as the context in which these changes occur. Candidate interactions, gameplay and manipulation of game mechanics provide important evidence of their thinking. The importance and advantage this extended capability delivers is greater insight than traditional psychometric assessments.