Reposted from five years ago.
A 2015 worldwide human study Hunger promotes acquisition of nonfood objects found that people’s current degree of hungriness affected their propensity to acquire nonfood items.
The researchers admitted that they didn’t demonstrate cause and effect with the five experiments they performed, although the findings had merit. News articles poked good-natured fun at the findings with headlines such as “Why Hungry People Want More Binder Clips.”
The research caught my eye with these statements:
“Hunger’s influence extends beyond food consumption to the acquisition of nonfood items that cannot satisfy the underlying need.
We conclude that a basic biologically based motivation can affect substantively unrelated behaviors that cannot satisfy the motivation.“
The concept of the quotes relates to a principle of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy – symbolic satisfaction of needs. Two fundamentals of Primal Therapy:
- The physiological impacts of our early unmet needs drive our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
- The painful impacts of our unfulfilled needs impel us to be constantly vigilant for some way to fulfill them.
Corollary principles of Primal Therapy:
- Our present efforts to fulfill our early unmet needs will seldom be satisfying. It’s too late.
- We acquire substitutes now for what we really needed back then.
- Acquiring these symbols of our early unmet needs may – at best – temporarily satisfy derivative needs.
But the symbolic satisfaction of derived needs – the symptoms – never resolves the impacts of early unfulfilled needs – the motivating causes:
- We repeat the acquisition behavior, and get caught in a circle of acting out our feelings and impulses driven by these conditions.
- The unconscious act-outs become sources of misery both to us and to the people around us.
As this study’s findings showed, there’s every reason for us to want researchers to provide a factual blueprint of causes for our hunger sensation effects, such as “unrelated behaviors that cannot satisfy the motivation.“
Hunger research objectives could include answering:
- What enduring physiological changes occurred as a result of past hunger?
- How do these changes affect the subjects’ present behaviors, thoughts, and feelings?
Hunger research causal evidence for the effect of why people acquire “items that cannot satisfy the underlying need” may include studying where to start the timelines for the impacts of hunger. The impacts potentially go back at least to infancy when we were completely dependent on our caregivers.
Infants can’t get up to go to the refrigerator to satisfy their hunger. All a hungry infant can do is call attention to their need, and feel pain from the deprivation of their need.
Is infancy far back enough, though, to understand the beginnings of potential impacts of hunger?
Surface Your Real Self 