WASHINGTON – What causes a person to go from hunger to total hunger? This combination of hunger and anger is more than a drop in blood sugar. According to research by the American Psychological Association, it can be a complex emotional reaction that involves interactions between biology, personality, and the environment.
“We all know that hunger can sometimes affect our emotions and perceptions of the world around us, but only recently has the term” hunger “, which means being poorly adjusted or disturbed by hunger, been accepted by the Oxford Dictionary,” the authors say main Jennifer MacCormack. MA, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Psychology and Neuroscience at Chapel Hill. “Our research aims to better understand the psychological mechanisms of the emotional state caused by hunger – if you feel hungry.”
This study was published in the journal Emotion®.
When you are hungry, MacCormack says two important factors determine whether hunger contributes to negative emotions: context and self-confidence.
“They aren’t just hungry and don’t start peering around the universe,” said Christian professor Lindquist, Ph.D., co-author of the study. “We all feel hungry, we recognize the problem as being hungry, we eat sandwiches and we feel better. We find that feelings of hunger occur when you are in trouble due to hunger, but you interpret these feelings as intense Emotions for other people or situations where you are. “”
First, the researchers conducted two online experiments with more than 400 people from the United States. Depending on the experiment, participants are shown images that should evoke positive, neutral or negative emotions. Then they were shown ambiguous images, Chinese pictographs, and asked to rate symbols on a seven-point scale from pleasant to uncomfortable. Participants were also asked to report how hungry they were.
The researchers found that starving participants saw ambiguous Chinese pictograms as negative, but only after they were lured with negative images for the first time. There are no effects on neutral or positive images. “The idea is that negative images give people context to interpret their feelings of hunger, which means pictograms are uncomfortable,” McCormack said. “So, an uncomfortable situation seems to be something special that makes people hungry rather than, for example, pleasant or neutral.”
MacCormack isn’t just an environmental cause, it can affect whether you switch from hungry to hungry. People’s emotional awareness is also important. People who are more aware that their hunger manifests as emotions tend to become hungry.
In laboratory experiments with more than 200 students, the researchers asked participants to fast or eat first. After some students are asked to do writing exercises to focus on their emotions, all participants are asked to participate in scenarios that are intended to arouse negative emotions. Students are asked to do annoying exercises on a computer which, without realizing it, is programmed to crash just before graduating. Then one of the researchers entered the room and blamed students for a computer accident.
Participants were then asked to fill out questionnaires about emotions and their perceptions about the quality of the experiment. Researchers have found that hungry people report more uncomfortable emotions such as stress and hate if they don’t explicitly focus on their own emotions. These people also think that researchers who conduct experiments are more judgmental or abusive. Participants who spend time thinking about their emotions, even when they are hungry, do not report these changes in emotions or social perception.
“A well-known advertisement once said,” You are not in a time of hunger, “but our data shows that you can withdraw even if you only withdraw from the current situation and see how you feel when you do it, hungry,” McCormack said.
According to MacCormack, this research emphasizes the relationship between body and mind. “Our bodies play an important role in shaping our experiences from time to time – perceptions and behaviors – whether we are hungry for full, tired for resting, or sick for health,” he said. “This means that it is important to pay attention to our bodies, pay attention to these bodily signals and not carry them on because they are not only important for our long-term mental health, but also the daily quality of our psychological and social experiences. Connections and work.”
Although this research focuses on hunger, MacCormack believes that these results can extend to other physical conditions that cause negative emotions, such as fatigue or inflammation. To confirm this, however, additional checks must be carried out.
Source: New York Times, USA Today