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So scientists have now proven that being “hangry” is real thing. What took them so long?
Well, first of all things which seem intuitively right such as the weather making pain worse have actually been shown to have no correlation. So, things which seem obvious sometimes aren’t true. Secondly there has been plenty of research into mood and various factors but little done with being hungry and angry in the real world “in the wild” so to speak.
This is measuring this when people go about their normal lives — obviously many other factors contribute to anger and irritability other than hunger.
In these sorts of situations groups of volunteers are monitored with an app and they are prompted randomly to provide answers to questions on their current mood and level of hunger.
In this experiment, led by Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University, 64 adults were tracked over 21 days with five check-ins per day.
What did they find?
Yes, there was a strong correlation between hunger and anger and irritability. Specifically, 37% of the variance in irritability, 34% of the variance in anger, and 38% of the variance in pleasure was put down to hunger.
