During the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, American snowboarder Chloe Kim tweeted about her breakfast: "I wish I had finished my breakfast sandwich, but my stubbornness decided not to and now I’m hangry . " Kim’s experience of being "hangry ," a portmanteau of hungry and angry , would seem common: the term has entered colloquial use, at least in the English language, and many people seem to be aware that the state of hunger can have a effect on both emotional experiences and behavior.
More specifically, both conceptual and historical accounts suggest that hunger often leads to negative emotions , such as anger and irritability. However, despite this, surprisingly little research has focused on the experience, manifestation, and consequences of being hungry, particularly in everyday settings. To rectify this oversight, we report the results of the first experience sampling study on the emotional outcomes of hunger.
Being “hangry”
The state of hunger is known to affect emotions and judgments in many different domains, including experiences of anger and irritability. In many non-human species, for example, food deprivation has been causally observed to increase motivations to engage in escalated and persistent aggression to obtain food resources.
Similarly, in humans, hunger is often assumed to evoke negative emotions, such as anger, irritability, and rage, but the evidence base is somewhat equivocal. Early cross-sectional studies, for example, linked hunger to feelings of restlessness, nervousness, and irritability as well as behavioral difficulties in children, but they operationalized the emotional outcomes in different ways. More recently, some studies have investigated whether short-term fasting has an impact on mood and affect, but the findings have been equivocal.
Summary
The colloquial term “ hangry” refers to the notion that people get angry when they are hungry, but very little research has directly determined the extent to which the relationship between hunger and negative emotions is strong. .
Here, we examined associations between everyday experiences of hunger and negative emotions using an experience sampling method. Sixty-four participants from Central Europe completed a 21-day experience sampling phase in which they reported their hunger, anger, irritability, pleasure, and arousal at five time points each day (total = 9,142 responses).
Results indicated that higher levels of self-reported hunger were associated with greater feelings of anger and irritability, and with lower pleasure.
These findings remained significant after taking into account participants’ sex, age, body mass index, dietary behaviors, and trait anger. In contrast, associations with arousal were not significant. These results provide evidence that everyday levels of hunger are associated with negative emotionality and support the notion of being “hangry . ”
Discussion
Our results cannot speak to the distinction between ego depletion theory (i.e., that negative emotions are triggered by limited self-control as a result of low blood glucose levels) and context-dependent conceptualizations of negative emotionality . The first offers perhaps the most parsimonious explanation for our results: from this point of view, it was expected that participants would be less able to exercise self -regulation and self-control when they were hungry, which would trigger negative emotions such as anger.
Our data and research design do not allow us to rule out this possibility, although it should be noted that this self-monitoring model has been criticized in light of large-scale replications that have provided, at best, weak supporting evidence. Rather than conceptualizing the hunger-negative emotions link as arising from a lack of self-control, recent research suggests that it may be more accurate to frame it in terms of the ways in which emotions are conceptualized as negative in specific situations.
More specifically, MacCormack and Lindquist suggested that people experience instances of heightened emotionality of multiple types (e.g., anger, irritability) when hunger-induced affect is conceptualized as emotions within specific contexts . Applied to our findings, it could be suggested that the experience of hunger translates into negative emotions through a variety of cues and everyday situational contexts that are perceived negatively. Indeed, our results showed that hunger was associated with an overall feeling of less pleasure, as indicated by Russell’s affect grid.
In turn, various situational cues, such as interpersonal interactions, warmth, even being asked to complete a survey, can help people make sense of their decreased pleasure by attributing their feelings to negative emotional categories, such as anger and irritability. In other words, hunger may not automatically lead to negative emotions, but since inferences about the meaning of affect tend to be relatively automatic and unconscious, it may not take long for hungry people to experience anger and irritability.
Importantly, we found that the associations between hunger and negative emotionality remained stable even after controlling for demographic factors (participant age and sex), BMI, dietary behavior, and trait anger. This provides preliminary evidence that the link between hunger and negative emotions may be relatively strong across different social identity groups.
Furthermore, our results showed that negative emotions (irritability, anger, and decreased pleasure) were predicted by both daily hunger fluctuations and mean hunger levels over the previous three weeks. We believe this is the first time that a link to negative emotions has been demonstrated with two different forms of self-reported hunger, suggesting that the link may be quite strong.
In contrast, our results suggest that hunger was not significantly associated with arousal levels . Although we suspected this might be because the relationship between hunger and arousal was nonlinear, further testing indicated that a quadratic function did not fit the data any better than a linear function. Based on our results, it can be argued that it is the combination of negative states and high arousal that is related to high levels of hunger, rather than arousal per se . This may also help explain why high arousal states, such as anger, in our study showed a significant relationship with self-reported hunger.
More generally, the null effect for arousal is consistent with MacCormack and Lindquist’s findings: to the extent that mood congruence and attribution effects are important in determining when hunger translates into outcomes. emotional, then arousal alone may not be enough. matter as much as valence-contextualized arousal (i.e., where a negative psychological or situational context provides an impetus to conceptualize hunger-induced arousal as an emotional state related to the situational context).
Conclusion The results of the present study suggest that the experience of being “hangry” is real, to the extent that hunger was associated with greater anger and irritability and less pleasure in our sample over a three-week period. These results may have important implications for understanding everyday experiences of emotions and may also help professionals more effectively ensure productive individual behaviors and interpersonal relationships (e.g., by ensuring that no one goes hungry). Although our results do not present ways to mitigate hunger-induced negative emotions, existing research suggests that being able to label an emotion by putting the feelings into words (e.g., "anger" ) could help people regulate those emotions ( granularity ). . In turn, this “affect labeling” could help reduce the likelihood that hunger will lead to negative emotions and, by extension, dysfunctional behaviors. As MacCormack and Lindquist have suggested, being able to label one’s affective state through emotions (e.g., "I’m hungry" ) could allow people to make sense of their experiences, but may also illuminate the best strategies for minimizing those negative feelings. ("I should eat"). |
Comments
"Our study suggests that when you feel hungry, someone is also more likely to feel angry," Swami said. "When you’re hungry, you’re more likely to feel more irritable and experience less pleasure."
Hangry is such a common term that it has been included in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. But so far very little research has been devoted to the phenomenon, Swami noted.
For this study, her team recruited 64 Europeans who self-reported their hunger levels and answered questions about their emotional well-being over a 21-day period. Participants used a cell phone app to report feelings of hunger and their emotional state five times a day, allowing researchers to collect data throughout each person’s daily life.
The study found that hunger was strongly associated with mood swings.
Hunger was related to 37% of the variation in a person’s irritability; 34% variation in anger, and 38% variation in feelings of pleasure.
Negative emotions (irritability, anger, and disgust) also appeared to be caused by both daily fluctuations in hunger and continuous levels of hunger.
"Ours is the first study to examine hunger outside of a laboratory," Swami said. "By following people in their daily lives, we found that hunger was related to levels of anger, irritability and pleasure."
There are a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon.
Low blood sugar levels can have a direct effect on brain function, said Jennifer Cholewka, who reviewed the findings. She is a clinically advanced nutrition coordinator at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
"When our blood sugar starts to drop, our brain starts to malfunction and we get confused, we get irritated," Cholewka said. "But I don’t know if acute hunger can cause hypoglycemia where we would see a brain fog type situation."
Another theory holds that when people are hungry, they are more likely to interpret cues from the world around them in a negative way, Swami said.
"As a very simple example, if I’m hungry right now, I’m much more likely to interpret other people in my presence or heat or any type of stimulus in the environment as a negative stimulus ," he said. "And that makes me feel angry."
It is important to understand “hangry” as a real emotional state so that people can cope better, Swami noted. "Once you are able to understand your emotional state, once you understand that you are feeling hangry , there are things you can do about it," Swami said. "Once I can label the emotion I’m experiencing, it’s easier for me to resolve it."
It may also help explain why hungry children do worse in school and why some employees might be less productive if they haven’t eaten, he said. But Cholewka said he believes more research needs to be done to cement Hangry’s status as a true emotional state.
Future studies should measure blood sugar and hunger-related hormones, such as ghrelin and leptin , to firmly establish that people are truly biologically hungry, Cholewka said. That will allow for a stronger correlation between hunger and its effect on emotions.
"I feel like they did a very thorough job in terms of finding correlations between our emotions and hunger, but more research needs to be done," Cholewka said.
