A new study now suggests people are most interested in having sex around the Christmas holidays.
While scientists have always maintained that the post-holiday ‘baby boom’ which leads to annual birth rate spikes in September due to seasonal changes than have an impact on human biology.
However, according to a report published in Phys.org, scientists at Indiana University and Portugal's Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência now say that evidence suggests the September baby trend is actually society's fault, not nature's.
The study which appeared in the December 21 issue of Scientific Reports, the scientists mined web searches and Twitter posts to discover the 'collective unconscious' pointing towards humanity's hidden desires and motivations.
They based their findings on data taken from almost 130 countries, including sex-related Google search terms used between 2004 to 2014 and 10 per cent of Twitter posts from late 2010 to 2014.
The analysis showed that there was a significantly greater frequency of the word 'sex' or other sexual terms appearing in web searches during major cultural or religious celebrations, as opposed to other times of the year, indicating that people were more interested in the act at those times.
They also used 'sentiment analysis' to evaluate word choices in public Twitter posts. They found that people en masse appeared to feel happier, safer and calmer during the holiday season.
Scientists found that the holiday peaks in sex-based web searches and content-feeling tweets tended to correspond with an increase in births that occurred nine months later. The relationship between the two was particularly notable during both Christmas in Christian-majority countries and the end of Ramadan's Eid-al-Fitr celebrations in Muslim-majority countries.
