reading titles of papers

this is one of those “if i never had to work what would i do (beside photography and travel)” things.

BBC posted an article on Romantic love ‘lasts just a year’ citing a research article. i love these kinds of news as they lead to a fantastic amount of facianting research.

so, again, upon reading such an article i jet to e-resources of u of t and try to find the original. unfortunately news articles cite their sources very liberally (i.e. mention the author and journal, but not paper title or anything like that), thus it involves some looking up.

the moment i open any given journal on scholar’s portal (biggest collection of online research journals and articles at u of t), i start to drool and wish i could read alll of them. i still haven’t found the original of the BBC article, but here is a skimming from today’s “casual research”; the articles i’d love to read just to gain the knowledge:

The role of the amygdala in human fear: Automatic detection of threat

Stress hormones in health and illness: The roles of work and gender

Coping with critical life events and lack of control—the exertion of control

The effect of a low dose of alcohol on allopregnanolone serum concentrations across the menstrual cycle in women with severe premenstrual syndrome and controls

Weight loss strategies, stress, and cognitive function: Supervised versus unsupervised dieting

Prenatal stress and children’s cortisol reaction to the first day of school

these are from Psychoneuroendocrinology journal.

i couldn’t find the article there (grr, and google scholar ain’t helping either), so i looked up “romantic love” in the u of t scholar’s portal. results (ohmygosh! hesi i think you’ll like this) – there is a journal called Psychology and Marketing .

articles from that:

Romantic love and sex: Their relationship and impacts on ad attitudes

Direct evidence of ending-digit drop-off in price information processing

On-line product presentation: Effects on mood, perceived risk, and purchase intention

The dark side of discounts: An inaction inertia perspective on the post-promotion dip

A cognitive and behavioral hierarchical decision-making model of college students’ alcohol consumption

Memory for advertising and information content: Comparing the printed page to the computer screen

The interaction of retail density and music tempo: Effects on shopper responses

A cross-cultural exploration of attitudes toward product expiration dates

the The Journal of Comparative Neurology Volume: 493, Issue: 1, 5 December 2005, pp. 58 – 62 has an article titled Romantic love: An fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice

i want to read them all, collect them all. and this is just from a 15-20 minute casual browsal/search of just one of the many (at least 10 major, 50 minor) online collections of journals, all searchable.

and each article has references, which lead to more facianting stuff, and and and this is just the latest research (all of these are at most 6 months old – nearly nothing, given how my friend published a linguistics article on a book written in 1973!)

i wish i could be one of those people who writes news articles based on these journals. that’d be FREAKIN’ SWEET!

P.S. Tickets to Australia bought. Tickets to New Zealand bought (open-jaw – flying into Auckland and leaving from Christchurch). Residence secured (the mixed orange roof thing around a big tree). All that’s left is visa (easy), and figuring out the pleasantries of what to do in NZ, and what and how to pack. i foresee a lot of pleasant shopping for bags for me.

update: boingboing to the rescue! they posted a link to the original paper i was looking for