Are You 'Hangry'? Eat Something! First-Of-Its-Kind Study Links Anger To Hunger

A new study has discovered how feeling hungry can make people "hangry", a portmanteau of hungry and angry. Emotions such as anger and irritability are found to be strongly linked with hunger. 

According to a new study, hunger is associated with greater levels of anger and irritability, and lower levels of pleasure. | Representative Photo

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A new study has discovered how feeling hungry can make people "hangry", a word used to describe someone who becomes bad-tempered irritable as a result of hunger. A team of researchers led by academics from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in the United Kingdom and the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Austria found that emotions such as anger and irritability are strongly linked with hunger. 

The study, which is the first to investigate how hunger affects people's emotions on a day-to-day level, was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Hangry is a portmanteau of hungry and angry, and is now used in everyday language. However, the phenomenon has not been widely explored outside of laboratory experiments.

The Findings

According to the new study, hunger is associated with greater levels of anger and irritability, and lower levels of pleasure. As many as 64 adult participants from central Europe participated in the study. The researchers recorded their levels of hunger and several measures of emotional well-being over a 21-day period.

The participants reported their feelings and levels of hunger on a smartphone app five times a day. This allowed data collection to take place in the participants' everyday environments, such as their workplace and at home.

The study found that hunger is associated with stronger feelings of anger and irritability. However, the ratings of pleasure felt by the participants while hungry were low. The researchers took into account demographic factors such as age, sex, body mass index, dietary behaviour, and individual personality traits.

New Study Is First To Examine Being ‘Hangry’ Outside Of Lab

In a statement released by Anglia Ruskin University, Viren Swami, the lead author on the paper, said many people are aware that being hungry can influence one's emotions, but surprisingly little scientific research has focused on being 'hangry'. 

He stated that the new study is the first to examine being 'hangry' outside of a lab. The researchers followed people in their day-to-day lives, and found that hunger was related to levels of anger, irritability, and pleasure.

He further said that although the study does not 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 recognising that one feels angry simply because they are hungry. He explained that greater awareness of being 'hangry' could reduce the likelihood that hunger results in negative emotions and behaviours in individuals. 

Stefan Stieger, a researcher at Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, who carried out the field work, said this 'hangry' effect has not been analysed in detail. Therefore, the team chose a field-based approach where participants were invited to respond to prompts to complete brief surveys on an app. The participants were sent these prompts five times a day at semi-random occasions over a three-week period. 

This gave the researchers a more complete picture of how people experience the emotional outcomes of hunger in their everyday lives.