'Hanger' and beyond: Measuring hunger-related mood dysregulation and its links with mental health, functioning and...

Some people experience mood changes when hungry. However, the relevance of this phenomenon to clinical conditions, such as depression, anxiety and eating disorders, is understudied. Therefore, we devised a questionnaire to measure hunger-related mood dysregulation.

We developed and validated the Mood, Emotions and Appetite List (MEAL) using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis in adults and adolescents in the community, and adults with a history of mental health disorder (N = 1119). We examined the association of MEAL scores with happiness, frustration and boredom during the frustration-inducing mood drift task, in which participants wait for six minutes and rate their mood every 30 s.

The MEAL showed good psychometric properties, capturing three factors for hunger-related 'irritability', 'low mood' and 'somatic feelings' (RMSEA = 0.03 in community adults, 0.05 in community adolescents, 0.08 in adults with mental health disorder history). Quantitative and qualitative responses evidenced that hunger-related mood dysregulation impacts relationships, work and hobbies. MEAL scores were associated with irritability, depression, anxiety and menstrual symptoms. In the mood drift task, the irritability subscale (MEAL-i) demonstrated a significant interaction with time, such that individuals with higher MEAL-i scores reported steeper decreases in happiness (B = -0.11; 95 % CI: -0.16--0.06) and steeper increases in boredom (B = 0.06; 95 % CI: 0.00-0.12) and frustration (B = 0.12; 95 % CI: 0.05-0.19).

The MEAL measures individual differences in hunger-related mood dysregulation, is associated with mental health, self-reported functioning, and predicts faster worsening of mood during experimentally induced frustration.