Surely they have told you once that when you are hungry you can not even talk to you. The truth is that having an empty stomach generates really negative feelings, but what kind of feelings do we experience?
New scientific research that has been published in the journal PLOS ONE has discovered that feeling hunger provokes emotions like anger and irritability.
With these conclusions, this study is the first to focus on investigating how hunger affects emotions of people on a daily basis.
The word “hangry”, in English, is a mixture of the words “hungry” (hungry) and angry” (angry), and is used in everyday life to describe a feeling.
According to this new study, which has been led by academics from the Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), in the United Kingdom, and the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, in Austria, hunger is associated with higher levels of anger and irritability, as well as with lower levels of pleasure.
Anger and irritability, the feelings mostly experienced
In order to reach these conclusions, the researchers selected a total of 64 adult participants from Central Europe. All of them recorded their hunger levels and various measures of emotional well-being over a 21-day period.
During this time, participants were asked to report their feelings and their hunger levels via a smartphone app. They did so a total of five times a day, which allowed data collection to take place in the everyday environments where participants used to be, such as their workplace and home.
Finally, the results of the study have indicated that hunger is associated with angry feelingsspecifically anger and irritability, as well as lower levels of pleasure.
Furthermore, these effects were substantial even after accounting for demographic factors such as age and gender, body mass index, dietary behavior, and individual personality traits.
As the experts indicate, hunger was associated with 37% of the variation in irritability34% of the variation of the ira and 38% of the variation of the placer.
The research also found that negative emotions, such as irritability, anger and disgust, are caused by both daily fluctuations in hunger and residual levels of hunger that are measured by averages over the three-week period.
Learn to control the negative feelings that hunger causes
With these data, Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and lead author of the study, assures that, although many of us were already aware that being hungry can influence our emotionsresearch has managed to discover how that sensation affects our feelings.
Thus, this is the first study conducted outside the lab, since people were followed throughout their daily lives.
On the other hand, although the study does not present ways to mitigate the negative emotions induced by hunger, the research does suggest “that being able to label an emotion can help people regulate it”, that is, with these data people will be able to recognize that they are really angry simply because they are hungry.
With this they intend raise awareness and reduce the likelihood of hunger turning into negative emotions and behaviors in people.
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