Do you know someone who gets in a terrible mood when they are hungry? Sure you do, or even you are one of them. It is something very common, so much so that the Oxford Dictionary, equivalent to that of the RAE in Spanish, has recently accepted the term hangry , an ingenious play on words between angry (angry) and hunger (hungry).
A team of psychologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) has carried out a series of tests to determine why some people are more enraged by the feeling of hunger than others. As they reveal, it is a complex combination of emotional stages that go beyond a simple sugar crash.
In one of the experiments, published in the magazine Emotion , and in which more than 400 people from the US participated, the volunteers were shown different images designed to induce positive, negative or neutral feelings in them. After showing them an image with a Chinese pictogram, totally neutral, they had to evaluate on a 7-point scale if they found it pleasant or unpleasant. They also had to say if at that moment they felt hungry.
The researchers found that the hungriest participants gave more negative scores to the image, but this only happened if they had previously seen unpleasant images. That is, this effect was not perceived after viewing positive or neutral photos. “It seems that unpleasant situations create a context in which hunger affects us more negatively,” explains Jennifer MacCormack, one of the researchers involved. In other words: if you’ve had a bad day, your hunger is likely to be much worse than if things were better for you.
The environment is not solely responsible
But let’s go a little further. We know that there are people who react much worse to hunger than others, so it cannot all be a matter of the environment. To verify this, the researchers carried out another experiment with 200 university students. Some had to go on an empty stomach and others after having eaten well. On the other hand, some volunteers had to complete a written exercise designed to focus on their emotions.
After this, the volunteers were asked to complete a rather tedious exercise on a computer that, to top it all, crashed in the middle of the test. After this, one of the investigators entered the room and blamed the student for the computer failure. In short, it was a situation created to cause discomfort in the participant.
After the experiment, the students filled out questionnaires in which they were asked about their emotions and their perception of the quality of the experiment. The researchers found that those who were fasting and who had not done the exercise of writing about their emotions felt more stressed and with general discomfort after finishing the test. This was not the case for volunteers who had done the exercise, including those who were hungry to start.
The bottom line is clear: when we are more aware of our emotions and how we feel, we are better able to cope with the discomfort of an empty stomach. Once again, the mind-body connection seems to play a key role in mastering our emotions. “The body plays a very powerful role in the perception of our experiences,” reflects MacCormack. “It is important to take care of them, pay attention to the bodily signals – tiredness, hunger, illness … – and not be indifferent to them, they are important for our long-term mental health and also for our daily psychological quality”.
Although this study has focused on hunger, the authors believe that the results could also be extended to other bodily sensations such as fatigue or inflammation , although more research will be necessary to verify this.
Reference: MacCormack and Lindquist 2018. Feeling Hangry? When Hunger is Conceptualized as Emotion. Emotion (11).
