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Author Correction: Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods
| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Correction article | 761.84 KB | Adobe PDF | ||
| main article | 2.53 MB | Adobe PDF | ||
| supplementary materials 1 | 5.11 MB | Adobe PDF | ||
| supplementary materials 2 | 347.91 KB | Microsoft Excel XML |
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.
Human reproduction does not happen uniformly throughout the year and what drives human sexual cycles is a long-standing question. The literature is mixed with respect to whether biological or cultural factors best explain these cycles. The biological hypothesis proposes that human reproductive cycles are an adaptation to the seasonal (hemisphere-dependent) cycles, while the cultural hypothesis proposes that conception dates vary mostly due to cultural factors, such as holidays. However, for many countries, common records used to investigate these hypotheses are incomplete or unavailable, biasing existing analysis towards Northern Hemisphere Christian countries. Here we show that interest in sex peaks sharply online during major cultural and religious celebrations, regardless of hemisphere location. This online interest, when shifted by nine months, corresponds to documented human births, even after adjusting for numerous factors such as language and amount of free time due to holidays. We further show that mood, measured independently on Twitter, contains distinct collective emotions associated with those cultural celebrations. Our results provide converging evidence that the cyclic sexual and reproductive behavior of human populations is mostly driven by culture and that this interest in sex is associated with specific emotions, characteristic of major cultural and religious celebrations.
Human reproduction does not happen uniformly throughout the year and what drives human sexual cycles is a long-standing question. The literature is mixed with respect to whether biological or cultural factors best explain these cycles. The biological hypothesis proposes that human reproductive cycles are an adaptation to the seasonal (hemisphere-dependent) cycles, while the cultural hypothesis proposes that conception dates vary mostly due to cultural factors, such as holidays. However, for many countries, common records used to investigate these hypotheses are incomplete or unavailable, biasing existing analysis towards Northern Hemisphere Christian countries. Here we show that interest in sex peaks sharply online during major cultural and religious celebrations, regardless of hemisphere location. This online interest, when shifted by nine months, corresponds to documented human births, even after adjusting for numerous factors such as language and amount of free time due to holidays. We further show that mood, measured independently on Twitter, contains distinct collective emotions associated with those cultural celebrations. Our results provide converging evidence that the cyclic sexual and reproductive behavior of human populations is mostly driven by culture and that this interest in sex is associated with specific emotions, characteristic of major cultural and religious celebrations.
Description
This deposit is composed simultaneously by the original published article and also by the "correction" for the published article (erratum).
This deposit is composed by the main article plus the supplementary materials of the publication.
The link for the original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18262-5
This deposit is composed by the main article plus the supplementary materials of the publication.
The link for the original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18262-5
Keywords
Computational science Psychology and behaviour Risk factors
Citation
Wood, I. B., Varela, P. L., Bollen, J., Rocha, L. M. & Gonçalves-Sá, J. Author Correction: Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods. Sci Rep 8, 4144 (2018).
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group