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Science Explains Why You Get Hangry
Why some people become emotional monsters when they’re hungry
Megan Hess, a social media manager at a central Pennsylvania non-profit, says she’s a pretty chipper person the majority of the time. But when she gets hungry, she says, “I can’t deal with anybody’s crap.”
She can tell when the feeling is coming — “I’m like, ‘Oh, man, the hanger’s here,’” she says — and while she is an inveterate grazer, it still occasionally turns things pear-shaped. She and her manager still joke about the time she accidentally filmed an entire event upside down after finding herself hungry and unarmed with a snack. “Even if it’s not technically in my job description, I feel like it’s part of my job that I have to stay pretty well fed,” she says.
Everyone gets hungry sometimes, and everybody gets angry sometimes, but not everyone is equally susceptible to getting hangry. Hanger is a physical sensation of hunger combined with negative emotion, usually anger or frustration. Often the afflicted say they feel angry because they are hungry.
Jennifer MacCormack, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (UNC), says hanger is the interplay of interoception — an individual’s ability to sense things happening in their body — and the environmental…
