“Hungry” seems like a perfect word to describe the complaints some people show when they’re very hungry, but is it really the same thing?
Yes, scientists now say. In an experiment using data from 64 volunteers, European researchers found a clear link between hunger and emotions such as irritability and anger, according to a report published Wednesday in PLOS ONE.
The new study shows that “hunger is real,” lead study author Dr. Viren Swami, a professor of social psychology at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, told today by email. “Feeling hungry is associated with greater anger, irritability and lower levels of happiness.”
The likely reason is that “we are more likely to experience negative emotions when we are hungry because we are more likely to interpret contextual cues in a negative way,” Swami said.
Although some laboratory studies have been conducted on coat hangers, this is the first study to examine the phenomenon in the real world, Swamy said.
To take a closer look at the hanger, Swamy and his colleagues asked volunteers to record their hunger levels and emotional states on a smartphone app on a scale of 0 to 100 five times a day for 21 days.
For hunger, the scale ranged from “not at all hungry” to “very hungry. Similarly, ratings of irritability and anger ranged from “not at all” to “very”. Volunteers were also asked to rate their emotional state and alertness on a scale of 1 to 100.
Swamy and his colleagues also explored eating habits by providing participants with a questionnaire at the end of the study, asking about behaviors such as emotionally induced eating, food consumption caused by seeing others eat, and restrictive eating in the past three weeks.
Overall, 58% of volunteers said they usually ate breakfast, 78% said they ate lunch, 84% said they ate dinner, 48% said they snacked between meals, and 9% said they woke up in the evening to eat something.
The majority (53 percent) said they are often or always concerned about healthy eating, and 55 percent said they are concerned about hunger.
Swami and his colleagues found that daily changes in hunger, as well as average hunger levels, predicted negative mood over the course of the study. The hungrier people were, the angrier and more irritable they became.
“It’s really cool that they captured this in real life,” said Susan Carnell, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins.
Carnell wasn’t surprised by the findings because “more and more psychiatric research is linking the gut and the brain. It goes both ways. If gastrointestinal symptoms are present, they may be related to anxiety or depression. The gut communicates with the brain through various pathways – various hormones, for example, as well as the vagus nerve.”
One thing the current study can’t do is prove that hunger causes anger, Carnell said. It can only show that there is an association.
In fact, “if people find themselves often very hungry and in a bad mood, they may need to evaluate whether they’re eating enough during the day or whether they may want to switch to smaller amounts of food throughout the day,” says Jennifer Cholewka, RD, a certified clinical senior nutrition coordinator at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Cholewka said it may make sense for those who are often hungry to have some healthy snacks on hand, such as bananas, apples or a handful of nuts.
Dr. Debra Safer, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, says there may be evolutionary benefits to becoming aggressive when you’re hungry. That aggression may make you look harder when food is scarce, she adds.
Safer says people who suspect they may have a hanger problem can try writing down their emotional state and hunger level during the day, just like the volunteers in the study did. Then they can see for themselves if their hunger and anger are linked.