Why do you get so ‘hangry’!

Feeling “hangry” is more than a simple drop in blood sugar levels, say scientists who found that combination of hunger and anger may be caused by an interplay of biology, personality and environmental cues.

“We all know that hunger can sometimes affect our emotions and perceptions of the world around us, but it’s only recently that the expression hangry, meaning bad-tempered or irritable because of hunger, was accepted by the Oxford Dictionary,” said Jennifer MacCormack, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US.

When someone is hungry, there are two key things that determine if that hunger will contribute to negative emotions or not: context and self-awareness. “We find that feeling hangry happens when you feel unpleasantness due to hunger, but interpret those feelings as strong emotions about other people or the situation you’re in,” said assistant professor Kristen Lindquist.

The researchers first conducted two online experiments involving more than 400 individuals from the US. Depending on the experiment, participants were shown an image designed to induce positive, neutral or negative feelings. They were then shown an ambiguous image, a Chinese pictograph, and asked to rate the pictograph on a seven-point scale from pleasant to unpleasant. The researchers found that the hungrier participants were more likely to rate ambiguous Chinese pictographs as negative, but only after first being primed with a negative image. There was no effect for neutral or positive images.

It is not just environmental cues that can affect whether someone goes from hungry to hangry, said MacCormack. People’s level of emotional awareness also matters. People who are more aware that their hunger is manifesting as an emotion are less likely to become hangry.

The combination of hunger plus anger and low blood sugar levels give rise to this feeling