How hunger affects mood

Researchers from Bonn and Tübingen show that the effect is mediated by the conscious feeling of hunger

Universitatsklinikum Bonn

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Using a glucose sensor on the upper arm, the researchers continuously collected data on glucose levels—the basis for revealing connections between blood sugar, hunger, and mood in everyday life.

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Credit: University Hospital Bonn (UKB) / A. Winkler

Bonn, 9 December 2025 – When we are hungry, our mood often drops – a phenomenon colloquially known as “hangry.” A new study by the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn, and the University Hospital Center Tübingen now shows that this connection is not caused by unconscious metabolic processes. Rather, the decisive factor is that the lack of energy is consciously perceived as hunger – it is this conscious feeling of hunger that leads to a worse mood. The results have now been published in the journal eBioMedicine.

In the study, the researchers examined how glucose levels, feelings of hunger, and mood influence each other in 90 healthy adults over a period of four weeks. The participants wore continuous glucose monitors (CGM), as used in diabetes care, and regularly answered questions about their current hunger, satiety, and mood (Ecological Momentary Assessment, EMA) via a smartphone app.

“When glucose levels drop, mood also deteriorates. But this effect only occurs because people then feel hungrier,” explains first author Dr. Kristin Kaduk, postdoctoral researcher at the University Hospital for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Tübingen. “In other words, it is not the glucose level itself that raises or lowers mood, but rather how strongly we consciously perceive this lack of energy.”

The study thus provides new evidence for the importance of interoception—the conscious perception of internal bodily states—in the regulation of emotions. People who were particularly sensitive to changes in their glucose levels also showed fewer mood swings.

“Our results suggest that consciously feeling your own body can act as a kind of buffer for your mood,” adds corresponding author Prof. Nils Kroemer, who works in Tübingen in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital in the field of translational psychiatry and at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the UKB, and also conducts research as a professor of medical psychology at the University of Bonn. “A good sense of the body's own signals seems to help maintain emotional stability – even when energy levels fluctuate.”

The researchers also see this as an important basis for future studies in patients with metabolic or mental disorders.

“Many diseases such as depression or obesity are associated with altered metabolic processes,” says Prof. Kroemer. “A better understanding of how body perception and mood are related can help improve therapeutic approaches in the long term – for example, through targeted training of interoception or non-invasive stimulation of the vagus nerve, which connects the organs to the brain and influences interoception.”

The results underscore the close connection between metabolic and mental health—and show that conscious perception of one's own body is a central mechanism through which metabolic processes affect mood.

Participating institutions and funding:

In addition to the UKB, the University of Bonn, and the University Hospital of Tübingen, the German Center for Mental Health (DZPG) and the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) were also involved in the study. The study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Journal

EBioMedicine

DOI

10.1016/j.ebiom.2025.106035 

Article Title

Glucose levels are associated with mood, but the association is mediated by ratings of metabolic state

Charter Schools Continue to Neglect Special Needs Students

by Shawgi Tell / December 22nd, 2025

One of the most common and persistent criticisms made about charter schools over the last 30+ years is that they frequently shortchange special needs students. Every year numerous articles appear on this troubling topic and highlight the refusal of the charter school sector to overcome this nagging problem and put it behind them once and for all—even after multiple warnings from various authorities.

It is worth noting that special needs students are typically under-enrolled in non-profit and for-profit charter schools, mainly because they are deemed to be too high-needs and too expensive to enroll. Profit margins matter in both types of charter schools, which is why selective enrollment persists in the charter school sector.

A shocking recent example of a charter school grossly neglecting special needs students comes from Chicago, specifically the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy in Little Village on the Southwest Side of Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times states that, “Some [special needs] students [at the charter school] went three years without receiving mandated services, and others went their entire high school careers without a needed aide, a state investigation found.” Another news source reports, “State education officials are turning up the heat on Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy in Little Village, saying the charter high school repeatedly failed to fix special education violations and left more than 100 students without services they were legally owed.”

It bears repeating that such problems plague many charter schools across the country, not just one charter school here or there. It should also be recalled that all charter schools in the U.S. are deregulated and privately-operated, that is, they are run by unelected individuals and do not follow most of the laws, statutes, regulations, rules, and polices followed by traditional public schools. Charter schools also tend to have higher teacher turnover rates than traditional public schools, which undermines learning, continuity, stability, and collegiality. These and other conditions exacerbate problems in charter schools.

As a result of years of “repeated and unresolved” violations Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy will now be subject to intense oversight by Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Getting into more nitty gritty details, we learn that according to a letter sent by the state to Chicago Public Schools, “The state estimated that 100 of the roughly 500 students at Instituto last year missed between 12,000 and 80,000 minutes of instruction and services. The school also repeatedly failed to offer make-up services, even after the state compelled them…” Many violations remain unfixed.

Equally troubling, “CPS officials determined that nearly all 16 charter schools approved in the spring needed to improve their services for students with disabilities.” But there is more: CPS also informed the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy last April that their English Learner programs also “needs improvement.”

As noted above, the teacher turnover rate is very high in charter schools and often happens in a more volatile manner than it does in traditional public schools. This was the case at the Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy from the very beginning. The main reason for such high teacher turnover rates in charter schools is typically broad dissatisfaction with many aspects of working conditions (e.g., no voice in important affairs, long hours, inadequate pay, and poor treatment by school administrators). It is thus no surprise that about 90% of charter schools in the U.S. are not unionized. Charter school teachers are treated instead as at-will employees, just like in many corporations—hired and fired at the whim of administrators with little, if any, due process.

Sadly with such problems like these at charter schools (school violations of required services and high teacher turnover rates) there is little recourse for parents. They either tolerate such problems that have a negative impact on students’ development for years, embark on extensive paperwork in a frustrating bureaucratic labyrinth and hope for a resolution in a timely manner, or return to their host traditional public school district where conditions are usually better.

None of these nagging harmful problems would exist if traditional public schools were fully funded and deregulated privately-operated charter schools had to secure their own funding instead of siphoning public money (billions of dollars a year) from constantly-demonized traditional public schools.

Today it can be seen that more charter schools equals more problems. The constant increase in greed in a continually failing economy will only incentive neoliberals and privatizers to strive to open more charter schools, no matter how many problems and failures these unaccountable contract schools produce. Neoliberal forces will always claim that what they are doing “is for the kids” but such disinformation is designed to fool the gullible and those who analyze nothing.

There is a never-ending need for the public to become conscious of endless problems in the charter school sector and to find ways to speak up on an individual and collective basis against all forms of privatization, not just school privatization. Combining action with analysis is critical. Starving traditional public schools of funds, setting them up for failure, and then trying to pressure or convince parents that charter schools will save the day has failed time and again. There is a reason why thousands of charter schools have failed, closed, and abandoned millions of parents over the past 33 years (see here, here, and here).

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Shawgi Tell (PhD) is author of the book Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu. Read other articles by Shawgi.

 

Dr Laura K. Taylor receives European Research Council Consolidator Award to explore how identity can influence peacebuilding

UCD Research & Innovation

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Dr Laura K. Taylor, Associate Professor at University College Dublin (UCD) School of Psychology and Principal Investigator of the Helping Kids! lab, has received a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Award.

Dr Taylor will receive €2 million for her GENERATION EU project, which will explore how young people develop and align with a ‘European’ identity, and the implications that this can have for social cohesion and peace.  

The ERC today announced a total of €728 million in Consolidator Grants for 349 mid-career researchers. With funding from the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, these grants will support cutting-edge research at universities and research centres in 25 EU Member States and associated countries.

Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, said, “Congratulations to all the researchers on winning the ERC grants. The record budget of 728 million euro invested to support these scientific projects shows the EU is serious about making the continent attractive for excellent researchers.”

Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, said, “To see all this talent with groundbreaking ideas, based in Europe, is truly inspiring. This bold research may well lead to new industries, improve lives and strengthen Europe’s global standing. This was one of the most competitive ERC calls ever, with record demand and also many excellent projects left unfunded. It is yet another reminder of how urgent the call for increased EU investment in frontier research has become.”

Professor Niamh Moore Cherry, College Principal at UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, said, “Recognition of Assoc Prof Taylor’s research by the European Research Council through this award is most welcome given the timeliness of her GENERATION EU project on understanding how young people are developing and identifying with the idea of being European amidst great geopolitical uncertainty and polarisation. The GENERATION EU project builds on her previous work with children and young people in divided societies and will help us to better understand and foster inclusivity and social cohesion. We look forward to following this important research as it progresses.”

The ERC received 3,121 applications for this very competitive call - a 35 percent increase compared with the previous round. Recognising outstanding scholars, the Consolidator Awards aim to support those at a career stage where they may still be consolidating their own independent research teams to pursue their most promising research ideas.

The GENERATION EU Project

Children and adolescents account for 1 in 5 people in Europe today, and a significant number of these youths are within the first generation of native EU citizens in their country. Their support for, and identification with, Europe will have significant implications for peace on the continent.

The GENERATION EU project will investigate how European identity develops across childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, and the impact that this can have on peacebuilding and wider society. 

Project PI, Dr Laura K. Taylor, explains, “Superordinate identities, or overarching categories, like ‘European’, can be used to include or exclude. Such identities may help unite conflict rivals. My research in conflict zones across the continent shows that children who felt more European were more likely to act prosocially - to help and share - with conflict-rival peers. However, at a national level, there are examples where such categories have also been used to exclude and penalise minority groups. 

“GENERATION EU comes at a critical time, to enhance understanding of how we can build peace on the continent. This project explores how youth come to identify with superordinate identities, examining the potential positive impact that this can have on society, as well as the unintended negative consequences.” 

GENERATION EU takes an intergroup developmental approach to study risk and resilience processes for children, families and communities in settings of protracted conflict. Combining cross-national surveys, field experiments, archival research and large-scale quantitative text analysis, the project will generate a new comprehensive model and interdisciplinary data and tools for the fields of psychology and peacebuilding. This will have implications not only for European social cohesion and peace, but also for other global regional identities.

Learn more about the ERC Awards and see the full list of Awardees for this round here.

 

A freely available tool to document wartime destruction

PNAS Nexus

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Destruction analysis of all 10m×10m building pixels in Beirut over 12-day periods from July 11 to July 23 (left), July 23 to August 4 (middle), August 4 to August 16 (right; all 2020). Lower p-values indicate a higher likelihood that part of a building was destroyed. The harbor explosion on August 4 is denoted by the red dot in the middle image, with radii of the blast wave with varying distances (also in red). Buildings located directly next to the sea are missing some pixels due to the processing of the images.

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Credit: Racek et al.

Researchers develop a method to detect the destruction of buildings using freely available satellite radar imagery. Daniel Racek and colleagues’ algorithm analyzes publicly available Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar images from the European Space Agency to identify destroyed buildings in conflict zones. The method statistically assesses the visual similarity of locations over time, enabling detection of destruction from a single satellite image every 12 days, without requiring labeled training data or expensive proprietary imagery. Unlike optical satellites, radar operates through clouds and darkness. The authors validate the approach across three case studies: the 2020 Beirut harbor explosion, the 2022 siege of Mariupol, Ukraine, and the 2023–2024 Gaza conflict. In Beirut, the algorithm achieved precision of 86%, correctly identifying most buildings destroyed by the explosion. In Mariupol's Zhovtnevyi district, the method estimated 2,437 buildings were destroyed, some 22% of all buildings in the district. In Gaza, destruction estimates tracked closely with UN satellite analysis. According to the authors, the method democratizes access to conflict monitoring tools and enables near real-time assessment of building destruction for humanitarian response, human rights monitoring, and academic research on armed conflict.

Destruction analysis of all 10m×10m building pixels in Gaza over 12-day periods from September 18, to December 11, 2023. Lower p-values indicate a higher likelihood that part of a building was destroyed. The timeline at the bottom denotes key events taking place between image acquisition dates.

Credit

Racek et al.

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

Unsupervised detection of building destruction during war from publicly available radar satellite imagery

Article Publication Date

9-Dec-2025

 

Residential solar panels can raise electricity rates

PNAS Nexus

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A modeling study shows how under some conditions, increasing numbers of households with rooftop solar panels can lead to higher rates for those without their own solar system. When utility customers cancel their accounts after switching to residential solar panels, the utility must spread their fixed costs around to a smaller number of remaining customers, which can lead to rate increases. Charles Sims and colleagues studied how this pecuniary externality affects different income groups using agent-based computational economic modeling of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an area with some of the highest poverty rates in the United States. The authors asked 2,307 TVA residential customers whether they would be willing to invest in a rooftop battery-plus-solar system given varying upfront costs, savings on electric bills, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The model predicts that as the cost of a solar system falls, 30% of customers defect from the grid and retail rates rise by 10% by 2051. Those higher rates become another factor pushing customers towards solar, in what the authors term a “utility death spiral.” Five percent more high-income than low-income customers leave the grid, raising equity concerns as the rates go up for the remaining customers. According to the authors, utilities and policy makers concerned about the equity implications of a transitioning electric grid should consider the use of grid access fees for customers with solar panels to recoup fixed costs.

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

The equity implications of pecuniary externalities on an electric grid

Article Publication Date

9-Dec-2025