Abstract:

The effect of hunger on individual cognition and social behavior was reviewed based on the psychological perspective. Hunger has been related to impaired general cognitive function, biased cognition and decision-making. Other literature has evidenced that hunger can alter social attitude, reduce moral judgment standard and induce aggressive behavior. Three hypotheses discussed in previous literature were summarized: ego-depletion hypojournal, cognitive activation hypojournal and coordination mechanism hypojournal, all of which attempt to explain the psychological mechanism driving the effects of hunger. Upon evaluating the literature, it can be pointed out that existing researches have problems such as different subjective feelings of hunger, inaccurate measurement methods. Thus, a suggestion for future research is to focus on how to improve the validity of hunger measurement and explore the internal mechanism of hunger effect on the multiple physiological, psychological and social layers.

Key words: hunger, cognitive function, moral cognition, social attitude, aggressive behavior