It’s almost lunchtime, and you really need some food—you’re even starting to get grumpy. Some people describe this feeling as hangry—a combo of the words hungry and angry. But does hunger really affect our emotions? A team of scientists decided to investigate.
The researchers had 64 people track their emotions and hunger levels for three weeks. They found that participants who reported greater hunger were also likely to report greater feelings of anger and irritability. “When we’re hungry, we’re more likely to interpret information in a negative way,” says Viren Swami, a psychologist from Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom who worked on the study.