Late last fall, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) announced their graduate student award winners. Nalini Ramlakhan, a PhD student in Cognitive Science at Carleton received $105,000 for her research on emotions and morality.
“I am interested in the way in which we use our emotions and the way emotions guide our everyday moral judgments and behavior,” says Ramlakhan.
She says she got interested in this area because she has always been interested in “moral emotions” and populations that lack the capacity for specific emotions, such as empathy.
Some of her preliminary findings suggest that empathy is not necessary for morality and that disgust and distress motivate morality. She says she intends to support these findings with a meta-analysis.
Ramlakhan chose to do her Cognitive Science PhD at Carleton because she liked the interdisciplinary nature of the program. She also wanted to work with Dr. Andrew Brook, the founder of the program. “Dr. Brook is a very helpful and thorough supervisor, and always ensures that I’m on the right track. He is very supportive and knowledgeable, which makes the PhD experience much more enjoyable.”
Ramlakhan says she absolutely loves her program. “Because the program is very interdisciplinary, I’ve gotten the opportunity to work on projects that are very different from my main field of study. I’ve worked on a couple of linguistics projects with Dr. Ida Toivonen. I even got to spend a semester in Dr. Deepthi Kamawar’s psychology lab, which allowed me to look at my thesis project from a different angle.”
Carleton University graduate students recently received $3.3 million in funding from SSHRC.
More information about Carleton’s PhD program in Cognitive Science is available on our website.