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Are you one of those people who often find themselves feeling very angry when hungry? If yes, then you might, in fact, be getting hangry, which is the emotion you feel each time this happens. But what is the explanation behind this unusual feeling? Well, according to a new study which the journal Emotion recently published, it may be more than a casual drop in your blood sugar levels. According to experts, environment and physiology are two of the main factors causing this emotion. Things like self-awareness or context can make someone develop the feeling of hanger.
According to Jennifer MacCormack, the lead author of this new study, hunger is known to sometimes affect our perception of the world around and our emotions. However, recently, the Oxford Dictionary accepted the term “hangry” and defined it as being “bad-tempered or irritable because of hunger”. She says that their purpose with this study was to grasp a better understanding of the psychology behind this emotion. Coauthor Dr. Kristen Lindquist had a theory. Each time someone experienced a bad feeling caused by hunger, this emotion was then perceived towards the people around.
Feeling hangry? This may be why!
In order to demonstrate this theory, the team of experts conducted two separate online experiments. The first one involved 400 people that were shown an image intended to trigger a positive, negative or neutral emotion. After showing them another ambiguous image which they needed to rate as pleasant or not, they were asked about their level of hunger.
For the second one, 200 students had to chose to either eat or fast after solving a task that had the purpose to trigger certain emotions. After that, they needed to complete an exercise on a slow computer that was eventually going to crash. One of the researchers then blamed each of the students for the malfunction. This way, the author concluded that a negative or stressful environment and context might be what cause hunger to become a negative emotion. This translates now into the feeling of hanger.
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