We've ALL been there at some stage...
Since the dawn of food, we're sure 'Hanger' - being hungry and angry at the same time - has always existed, and now science has provided us with the proof!
Being 'Hangry' is described by Urban Dictionary as ''when you are so hungry that your lack of food causes you to become angry, frustrated or both.''
But there was still doubt as to whether being hangry was a real thing, or whether it was just an excuse angry people used to be be angry.
Well, those doubts have now been eradicated! Thanks to a new study published in the Journal Emotion.
“It’s generally accepted that hunger can impact our moods and even behaviors like aggression and impulsivity,” said Jennifer MacCormack, a doctoral student in the department of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and lead author the study.
“But we still don’t know much about the psychological mechanisms that transform hunger into feeling hangry.”
Here's how they did it
In an attempt to better understand the little things that trigger 'Hanger,' MacCormack and her colleagues did a series of experiments.
And what they found was that being in a stressful situation—and not being in tune with your emotions—may both make a person cross the line from hunger... into 'hanger.'
First, the researchers asked more than 400-people to do a few online experiments.
In the main one, people were shown an image that was meant to induce positive, neutral or negative feelings—like a puppy, lightbulb or snake.
They were then shown another neutral image—in this case, a Chinese pictograph.
The men and women were asked about their hunger levels and to rate the Chinese image on a scale from pleasant to unpleasant.
The hungrier the people were, the more likely they were to report that the image was unpleasant if they were shown a negative image (the snake) before it.
What does this mean? Well basically in a negative situation, people may be more likely to experience hanger—than if they are in a pleasant or neutral situation, the researchers say.
So it's more to do with the situation, rather than the actual hunger itself...
There you have it! The mystery of what makes us 'Hangry' has been solved.
