The Explanation of the Internal Relationships between Rationality and Emotion and its Implications for the Development of Creative Thinking in Higher Education

Universities are the most important institutes for producing new ideas and technologies, which depends on creative thinking. For reinforcing creativity among students, we need to learn more about theoretical bases of creativity.In this article, relationships between rationality, emotions and creativity are discussed, and then, some educational denotations for higher education are suggested.The results showed that there are different styles of rationality, and only algorithmic style is not related to emotions. But some other styles of rationality (such as relational, reflective, means-end and judgmental rationality) have internal relations with emotions. So, not only do emotions not disturb rationality, but also they are an important and supplementary part of rational processes such as decision-making. On the other hand, this essay showed that integrity of emotions with rationality enhances mind openness, prevents rationality freezing and activates explorative and transcendentive creativity. So, for integrating emotions to rationality and reforming teaching and assessment methods, some suggestions are put forward.