Spiced up with savage
Eating spicy food may up your violent quotient
The human behaviour researchers in India have generated what they say could be the first empirical evidence to support a link between the consumption of spicy food and aggression. The researchers say their findings suggest that spicy food may be a risk factor for aggression just as violent video games and hot weather, but caution that their results, based on experiments on 273 student volunteers, will need validation through larger studies.
"We are not saying that consuming spicy food increases aggression in the real world," says Tanuka Ghoshal, assistant professor at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, one of the lead authors of the research. "But there is a strong connection that needs to be further explored."
Ghoshal and her colleagues Rishtee Batra at the ISB and Rajagopal Raghunathan at the University of Texas, Austin, published their research findings on March 13 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Scientists trying to understand what influences aggressive human behaviour have over the past three decades collected evidence that they say shows that exposure to violent video games appears to increase aggressive behaviour in children and young adults. Several studies have also supported suggestions that uncomfortably hot weather can increase aggressive tendencies.
Researchers say no one questions the importance of individual personality traits that could be influenced by multiple factors, including the home environment. But such research is intended to investigate what else might contribute to aggression.
Last year, psychologists Paul van Lange at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Brad Bushman at the Ohio State University in the US had proposed a model to explain the observations of aggression in hot weather.
In a paper in the journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences, the researchers proposed that hot climate leads to less focus on the future and less self-control. "The interaction of weather, food and behaviour – this is a new
emerging field of research," said van Lange, who specialises in social psychology. "It is possible that certain food habits may themselves be influenced by the climate. It has been proposed that spicy food in hot climates helps decrease the risk of parasite infections."
Studies by other scientists in Europe and the US have prompted some to suggest that spicy food with high levels of a compound called capsaicin can trigger irritation and discomfort in people that may in turn evoke aggression.
Scientists caution that neither hot weather nor spicy food should be seen as responsible for aggression.
"Climate does not make a person," van Lange had asserted in a media release from Vrije University last year. "But it is a part of what influences each of us."
Likewise, researchers say the India study suggests that spicy food may be correlated with aggressive tendencies. "But this does not suggest that spicy food increases aggression, but that underlying factors that shape taste may also be involved in aggression," said Laurent Begue, a professor of psychology at the University of GrenobleAlpes, France. Begue and his colleagues had two years ago found a correlation between preference for spicy food and testosterone levels which can influence sensation-seeking behaviour.