Scientists reveal the truth about being hangry

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Hunger really can make us feel ‘hangry,’ reveals a new study.

Researchers found that feeling hungry triggers negative emotions such as anger and irritability.

The study is the first to investigate how hunger affects people’s emotions on a day-to-day basis.

The word 'hangry' - a combination of hungry and angry - is now used in everyday language, but the phenomenon had not been widely explored by science outside of lab environments until now.

The new study, led by academics from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Austria, found that hunger is associated with greater levels of anger and irritability, as well as lower levels of pleasure.

The research team recruited 64 adult participants from central Europe, who recorded their levels of hunger as well as a range of measures of emotional well-being over a 21-day period.

The participants were prompted to report their feelings and their levels of hunger on a smartphone app five times a day, allowing data to be collected in their everyday environments, such as their place of work or home.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS One, show that hunger is linked with stronger feelings of anger and irritability, as well as lower ratings of pleasure - and the effects were substantial, even after taking into account factors such as age and sex, body mass index (BMI), diet and individual personality traits.

Hunger was associated with 37 percent of the variance in irritability, 34 percent of the variance in anger and 38 percent of the variance in pleasure recorded by the participants.

The researchers also found that the negative emotions - irritability, anger, and unpleasantness - are caused by both day-to-day fluctuations in hunger, as well as residual levels of hunger measured by averages over the three-week period.

Study lead author Professor Viren Swami, of ARU, said: “Many of us are aware that being hungry can influence our emotions, but surprisingly little scientific research has focused on being ‘hangry.'

“Ours is the first study to examine being ‘hangry’ outside of a lab. By following people in their day-to-day lives, we found that hunger was related to levels of anger, irritability, and pleasure.

“Although our study doesn’t present ways to mitigate negative hunger-induced emotions, research suggests that being able to label an emotion can help people to regulate it, such as by recognizing that we feel angry simply because we are hungry.

"Therefore, greater awareness of being ‘hangry’ could reduce the likelihood that hunger results in negative emotions and behaviors in individuals.”

Professor Stefan Stieger, of Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences who conducted the fieldwork, said: “This ‘hangry’ effect hasn’t been analyzed in detail, so we chose a field-based approach where participants were invited to respond to prompts to complete brief surveys on an app.

"They were sent these prompts five times a day at semi-random occasions over a three-week period.

“This allowed us to generate intensive longitudinal data in a manner not possible with traditional laboratory-based research."

He added: "Although this approach requires a great deal of effort - not only for participants but also for researchers in designing such studies - the results provide a high degree of generalisability compared to laboratory studies, giving us a much more complete picture of how people experience the emotional outcomes of hunger in their everyday lives.”