A Comparison of Thinking Styles and Emotional Creativity between Gifted and Ordinary Students

The present research aims to study the differences in thinking styles and emotional creativity in gifted and ordinary 1st-grade high school students in Urmia city. The research method was that of causal-comparative. Using multi-stage cluster sampling method, 400 subjects (including 200 gifted, 200 ordinary ones) were selected from among the 1st-grade high school students in Urmia. The Thinking Styles Inventory (Sternberg, 1994) and the Emotional Creativity Inventory (Averill, 1994) were carried out on them. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results showed that there was a significant difference between ordinary and gifted students in their emotional creativity and thinking styles. The mean of legislative and judicial thinking styles in gifted students were higher than that of ordinary students. Moreover, the mean of executive, global, local, and conservative thinking styles in ordinary students were higher than that of gifted students. Generally, the results suggest that the interaction between thinking styles and emotional creativity is an important factor in students’ individual learning differences. Although the results of this research are exploratory in nature, they have practical implications.