Barista

Assessment

What is it?

Barista is a psychometric game-based assessment that evaluates emotional intelligence by combining emotion recognition tasks with engaging gaming technology. The assessment, based on scientifically validated facial expression recognition tasks, measures a candidate’s ability to perceive and interpret emotions—a critical skill for communication and collaboration in professional environments.

In Barista, candidates step into the role of a barista, tasked with serving beverages based on customers' emotional cues. This immersive experience promotes focus and engagement, allowing candidates to perform at their best. By creating a flow state, candidates can forget they are being evaluated, resulting in authentic performance data. This innovative game-based method enables efficient, high-quality data collection in a short time frame.

Information

Provider:

Ixly

What it measures:

•

Emotion Recognition

•

Emotional Responsiveness

Categories:

•

Games

Measurement Objectives

Barista focuses on key emotional intelligence components, specifically emotion recognition. The core tasks include:

  • Identifying customer emotions from facial expressions.
  • Selecting the appropriate beverage that matches each customer’s emotional state.
  • Managing multiple customers as the game progresses, simulating real-life multitasking and stress management.

These skills are essential for professional roles requiring strong interpersonal communication and emotional awareness.

Use

Barista is ideal for contexts where emotional intelligence is a critical skill, such as recruitment and career development. Positions in customer service, sales, and management—where interpersonal interactions are frequent—benefit from candidates proficient in emotion recognition. Effective emotion recognition helps prevent misunderstandings and builds stronger workplace relationships, making Barista an invaluable tool for assessing candidates for roles that require emotional intelligence.

Results

The results from Barista provide a detailed analysis of a candidate’s emotion recognition ability, presented as percentile rankings compared to the reference group. These rankings give both an overall score and specific insights into how well the candidate can identify and respond to emotional cues. Percentile rankings enable a clear comparison of a candidate’s emotional intelligence relative to peers. Further reports detail the methods used and guide the interpretation of results for selection processes.

Development

The development of Barista is grounded in widely recognized facial expression recognition tasks, used extensively in psychological research. It has been enhanced with captivating visuals, rewarding feedback, and increasing difficulty to keep candidates engaged. The game was fine-tuned through extensive pilot studies conducted by a team of psychologists and game developers, incorporating feedback from participants to ensure accessibility for diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. A usability study validated the game’s effectiveness for a broad professional audience.

Reference Group

The reference group for Barista is based on data collected from research involving 172 individuals. This sample is representative of the Dutch labor force in terms of employment status (working or not working), gender, age, and educational level. The reference group serves as a benchmark for comparing candidate performance, ensuring reliable and valid results that are applicable to a variety of professional environments.

Key features

Development

The development of Barista is grounded in widely recognized facial expression recognition tasks, used extensively in psychological research. It has been enhanced with captivating visuals, rewarding feedback, and increasing difficulty to keep candidates engaged. The game was fine-tuned through extensive pilot studies conducted by a team of psychologists and game developers, incorporating feedback from participants to ensure accessibility for diverse cultural and educational backgrounds. A usability study validated the game’s effectiveness for a broad professional audience.

References

Mayer, J., Roberts, R. D., & Barsade, S. G. (2008). Human abilities: Emotional intelligence. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 507–536.

Van Rooy, D. L., Viswesvaran, C., & Pluta, P. (2005). An evaluation of construct validity: What is this thing called emotional intelligence. Human Performance, 18, 445–462. 10.1207/s15327043hup1804_9.

Zeidner, M., Roberts, R. D., & Matthews, G. (2008). The science of emotional intelligence: Current consensus and controversies. European Psychologist, 13, 64–78.