Tallahassee, Fla.

HAPPY New Year!" We seldom think of those words as an order. But in some respects that is what they are.

Doesn't every American want to be happy? And don't most Americans yearn, deep down, to be happy all of the time? The right laid out in our nation's Declaration of Independence - to pursue happiness to our hearts' content - is nowhere on better display than in the rites of the holiday season. With glad tidings and good cheer, we seek to bring one year to its natural happy conclusion, while preparing to usher in a happy new year and many happy returns.

Like the cycle of the seasons, our emphasis on mirth may seem timeless, as though human beings have always made merry from beginning to end. But in fact this preoccupation with perpetual happiness is relatively recent. As Thomas Carlyle observed in 1843, " 'Happiness our being's end and aim' is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world."

Carlyle's arithmetic was essentially sound, for changes in both religious and secular culture since the 17th century made "happiness," in the form of pleasure or good feeling, not only morally acceptable but commendable in and of itself. While many discounted religious notions that consigned life in this world to misery and sin, others discovered signs of God's providence in earthly satisfaction. The result was at once to weaken and transpose the ideal of heavenly felicity, in effect bringing it to earth. Suffering was not our natural state. Happy was the way we were meant to be.

That shift was monumental, and its implications far reaching. Among other things, it was behind the transformation of the holiday season from a time of pious remembrance into one of unadulterated bliss. Yet the effects were greater than that. As Carlyle complained, "Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has had his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, 'happy.' "

Carlyle was notoriously cranky, but his central insight - that the new doctrine of happiness tended to raise expectations that could never possibly be fulfilled - remains as relevant today as it was in 1843. Despite enjoying far better living standards and more avenues for pleasure than before, human beings are arguably no happier now than they've ever been.

Sociologists like to point out that the percentage of those describing themselves as "happy" or "very happy" has remained virtually unchanged in Europe and the United States since such surveys were first conducted in the 1950's. And yet, this January, like last year and next, the self-help industry will pour forth books promising to make us happier than we are today. The very demand for such books is a strong indication that they aren't working.

Should that be a cause for concern? Some critics say it is. For example, economists like Lord Richard Layard and Daniel Kahneman have argued that the apparent stagnancy of happiness in modern societies should prompt policymakers to shift their priorities from the creation of wealth to the creation of good feelings, from boosting gross national product to increasing gross national happiness.

But before we take such steps, we might do well to reflect on the darker side of holiday cheer: those mysterious blues that are apt to set in while the streamers stream and the corks pop; the little voice that even in the best of souls is sometimes moved to say, "Bah, humbug." As Carlyle put it, "The prophets preach to us, 'Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant things.' " But as he well knew, the very commandment tended to undermine its fulfillment, even to make us sad.

Carlyle's sometime friend and long-time rival, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, came to a similar conclusion. His words are all the more worth heeding in that Mill himself was a determined proponent of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so," Mill concluded after recovering from a serious bout of depression. Rather than resign himself to gloom, however, Mill vowed instead to look for happiness in another way.

"Those only are happy," he came to believe, "who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way." For our own culture, steeped as it is in the relentless pursuit of personal pleasure and endless cheer, that message is worth heeding.

So in these last days of 2005 I say to you, "Don't have a happy new year!" Have dinner with your family or walk in the park with friends. If you're so inclined, put in some good hours at the office or at your favorite charity, temple or church. Work on your jump shot or your child's model trains. With luck, you'll find happiness by the by. If not, your time won't be wasted. You may even bring a little joy to the world.

Darrin M. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State, is the author of the forthcoming"Happiness: A History."

Charlottesville, Va.

IT'S navel gazing time again, that stretch of the year when many of us turn our attention inward and think about how we can improve the way we live our lives. But as we embark on this annual ritual of introspection, we would do well to ask ourselves a simple question: Does it really do any good?

The poet Theodore Roethke had some insight into the matter: "Self-contemplation is a curse / That makes an old confusion worse." As a psychologist who conducts research on self-knowledge and happiness, I think Roethke had a point, one that's supported by a growing body of controlled psychological studies.

Not sure how you feel about a special person in your life? Analyzing the pluses and minuses of the relationship might not be the answer.

In a study I conducted with Dolores Kraft, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Dana Dunn, a social psychologist at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, people in one group were asked to list the reasons their relationship with a romantic partner was going the way it was, and then rate how satisfied they were with the relationship. People in another group were asked to rate their satisfaction without any analysis; they just gave their gut reactions.

It might seem that the people who thought about the specifics would be best at figuring out how they really felt, and that their satisfaction ratings would thus do the best job of predicting the outcome of their relationships.

In fact, we found the reverse. It was the people in the "gut feeling" group whose ratings predicted whether they were still dating their partner several months later. As for the navel gazers, their satisfaction ratings did not predict the outcome of their relationships at all. Our conclusion? Too much analysis can confuse people about how they really feel. There are severe limits to what we can discover through self-reflection, and trying to explain the unexplainable does not lead to a sudden parting of the seas with our hidden thoughts and feelings revealed like flopping fish.

Self-reflection is especially problematic when we are feeling down. Research by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a clinical psychologist at Yale University, shows that when people are depressed, ruminating on their problems makes things worse.

In one study, mildly depressed college students were asked to spend eight minutes thinking about themselves or to spend the same amount of time thinking about mundane topics like "clouds forming in the sky."

People in the first group focused on the negative things in their lives and sunk into a worse mood. People in the other group actually felt better afterward, possibly because their negative self-focus was "turned off" by the distraction task.

What about people like police officers and firefighters who witness terrible events? Is it helpful for them to reflect on their experiences?

For years it was believed that emergency workers should undergo a debriefing process to focus on and relive their experiences; the idea was that this would make them feel better and prevent mental health problems down the road. After 9/11, for example, well-meaning counselors flocked to New York to help police officers, firefighters and rescue workers deal with the trauma of what they had seen.

But did it do any good? In an extensive review of the research, a team led by Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard, concluded that debriefing procedures have little benefit and might even hurt by interrupting the normal healing process. People often distract themselves from thinking about painful events right after they occur, and this may be better than mentally reliving the events.

What can we do to improve ourselves and feel happier? Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle's observation that "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves.

Social psychologist Daniel Batson and colleagues at the University of Kansas found that participants who were given an opportunity to do a favor for another person ended up viewing themselves as kind, considerate people - unless, that is, they were asked to reflect on why they had done the favor. People in that group tended in the end to not view themselves as being especially kind.

The trick is to go out of our way to be kind to others without thinking too much about why we're doing it. As a bonus, our kindnesses will make us happier.

A study by University of California, Riverside, social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues found that college students instructed to do a few acts of kindness one day a week ended up being happier than a control group of students who received no special instructions.

As the new year begins, then, reach out and help others. If that sounds suspiciously like an old Motown song or like simplistic advice from one of those do-gooder college professors, well, it is. But the fact is that being good to others will ultimately make us kinder, happier people - just so long as we don't think too much about it.

Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is the author of "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious."

Dr. Joseph Sacco's young patient lay gasping for breath; she had advanced AIDS and now she was failing.

Assessing her, Dr. Sacco knew her medical options amounted to a question of the lesser of two evils: either the more aggressive ventilator, on which she would probably die, or the more passive morphine, from which she would probably slip into death. But there was also a slender chance that either treatment might help her rally.

He also knew that how he presented her options would affect her decision, the feather that would tip the balance of her hope scale.

As Dr. Sacco, a palliative care specialist at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, spoke to the woman on that chilly morning earlier this month, her eyes widened with terror: no intubation. He ordered morphine.

He agonized about his approach. "She's only 23," he said later that day. "Maybe I was too grim. Maybe I was conveying false hopelessness to her. Maybe I just should have said, 'Let's put you on the ventilator.' I may have spun it wrong."

The language of hope - whether, when and how to invoke it - has become an excruciatingly difficult issue in the modern relationship between doctor and patient.

For centuries, doctors followed Hippocrates' injunction to hold out hope to patients, even when it meant withholding the truth. But that canon has been blasted apart by modern patients' demands for honesty and more involvement in their care. Now, patients may be told more than they need or want to know. Yet they still also need and want hope.

In response, some doctors are beginning to think about hope in new ways. In certain cases, that means tempering a too-bleak prognosis. In others, it means resisting the allure of cutting-edge treatments with questionable benefits.

Already vulnerable when they learn they have a life-threatening disease or chronic illness, patients can feel bewildered, trapped between reality and possibility. They, as well as doctors, are discovering that in the modern medical world, hope itself cannot be monolithic. It can be defined in many ways, depending on the patient's medical condition and station in life. A dying woman can find hope by selecting wedding gifts for her toddlers. An infertile couple moves on toward adoption.

The power of a doctor's pronouncements is profound. When a doctor takes a blunt-is-best approach, enumerating side effects and dim statistics, in essence offering a hopeless prognosis, patients experience despair.

A radiation oncologist told Minna Immerman's husband, who had brain cancer, that he had less than two years to live. "That information was paralyzing," Mrs. Immerman said. "It wasn't helpful."

But when a doctor suggests that an exhausted patient try yet another therapy, in the hope that it may extend survival by weeks, the cost is also considerable - financially, physically and emotionally.

"We have to find a less toxic way to manage their hope," said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, an internist and Harvard professor who is writing a textbook about prognosis.

Efforts are being made across the medical community to grapple with the language and ethics of hope. Some medical schools pair students with end-stage disease patients so students can learn about anguish and compassion.

Numerous studies have examined what doctors say versus what patients hear and the role of optimism in the care of the critically ill. Patient advocates have been teaching doctors how patients can be devastated or braced by a turn of phrase.

A consensus is emerging that all patients need hope, and that doctors are obligated to offer it, in some form.

To Dr. Sacco's boundless relief, his patient rallied. He began counseling her to take her AIDS medications, to find an apartment, a job.

He wrote in an e-mail message: "We prognosticate because people ask us to and trust our judgment. They do not know the depth of our uncertainty or that no matter how good or experienced we are, we are often wrong. That is why choosing where to put the feather is so damn hard."

False Hopelessness

Robert Immerman, a 56-year-old Manhattan architect, knew that his brain cancer - a glioblastoma, Grade 4 - meant terrible news. After the tumor was removed, he asked the radiation oncologist his prognosis.

"The doctor was pleasant," Minna Immerman recalled, "as if he was telling you that hamburger was $2.99 a pound. He just said the likely survival rate with this tumor was, on the outside, 18 months.

"Bob purposely forgot it," she said. "I couldn't."

After radiation, Mr. Immerman began chemotherapy. But after one treatment, his white blood cell count dropped so precipitously that it was no longer an option.

"The medical oncologist said, 'The chances of survival with or without chemo are very, very slight,' " said Mrs. Immerman, a special-education teacher. "I think she was trying to make us feel better. What I heard was: 'With or without chemo, this won't end well, so don't feel so bad.' "

Mr. Immerman got scans every two months. Mrs. Immerman watched the calendar obsessively. Twelve months left. Six months. "As time passed, instead of feeling better, I felt like it was a death sentence and it was winding down," she said.

She sweated the small stuff: should they renew their opera subscription?

Mr. Immerman turned out to be one of those rare people who reside at the lucky tail end of a statistical curve. In February, it will be 10 years since he learned his prognosis. He is well. For years, Mrs. Immerman was shadowed by fear and depression about his illness, before she finally allowed herself to breathe out with gratitude.

Candid exchanges about diagnosis and prognosis, especially when the answers are grim, are a relatively recent phenomenon. Hippocrates taught that physicians should "comfort with solicitude and attention, revealing nothing of the patient's present or future condition." A dose of reality, doctors believed, could poison a patient's hope, the will to live.

Until the 1960's, that approach was largely embraced by physicians. Dr. Eric Cassell, who lectured about hope in November to doctors in the Boston area, recalled the days when a woman would wake from surgery, asking if she had cancer:

" 'No,' we'd say, 'you had suspicious cells so we took the breast, so you wouldn't get cancer.' We were all liars." Treatments were very limited. "Now when we're truthful," Dr. Cassell added, "it's in an era in which we believe we can do something."

Doctors in many third world countries and modernized nations, including Italy and Japan, still believe in withholding a bad prognosis. But the United States, Britain and other countries were revolutionized in the late 60's by the patients' rights movement, which established that patients had a legal right to be fully informed about their medical condition and treatment options.

Now, whether a patient comes in complaining of a backache, a rash or a lump in the armpit, many doctors interpret informed consent as the obligation to rattle off all possibilities, from best-case to worst-case situations. Honesty is imperative. But what benefit is served by Dr. Dour?

"There are doctors who paint a bleaker picture than necessary so they can turn out to be heroes if things turn out well," said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford medical school, "and it also relieves doctors of responsibility if bad things happen."

The fear of malpractice litigation after a bad outcome, he said, also drives doctors to be stunningly explicit from the outset.

The medical community has nicknames for this bluntness: truth-dumping, terminal candor, hanging crepe. But some social workers call it false hopelessness.

Given a time-tied prognosis, many patients become withdrawn and depressed, said Roz Kleban, a supervising social worker with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "Telling someone they have two years to live isn't useful knowledge," she said. "It's noise. Whether or not that prediction is true, they lose their ability to live well in the present."

Health care providers debate the wisdom of giving patients a precise prognosis: "There's an ethical obligation to tell people their prognosis," said Dr. Barron Lerner, an internist and bioethicist at Columbia University medical school, "but no reason to pound it into their heads."

Others say that doctors should make sure they can explain the numbers in context, with the pluses and minuses of treatment options, including the implications of choosing not to have treatment.

Though many patients ask how long they have to live, thinking that amid the chaos of bad news, a number offers something concrete, studies show that they do not understand statistical nuances and tend to misconstrue them. Moreover, though statistics may be indicative, they are inherently imperfect.

Many doctors prefer not to give a prognosis. And, studies show, their prognoses are often wrong, one way or the other.

Where does this leave the frightened patient?

Meg Gaines, director of the Center for Patient Partnerships, a patient advocacy program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, thinks false hopelessness is more debilitating than false hope.

"I tell people to ask the doctor, 'Have you ever known anyone with this disease who has gotten better?' If the answer is yes, just say, 'So let's quit talking about death and talk about what we can try!' "

Some patients do triumph against grotesque statistical odds; others succumb even when the odds are piled in their favor.

But willful ignorance, she cautioned, can be dangerous.

"People should know about prognosis to the extent that it's necessary to make good decisions about monitoring your health care," she said. "You can't be an ostrich in the sand. When the stampeding rhinoceri are coming, you have to be able to get out of the way."

False Hope

Perhaps just as harmful as false hopelessness, many experts believe, is false hope. "If one patient in a thousand will live with pancreatic cancer for 10 years," said Dr. Christakis of Harvard, and doctors hold out that patient as a realistic example, "we have harmed 999 patients." False hopelessness, in the name of reality, dwells on the dark view of a patient's condition, prematurely foreclosing possibility and a spirited fight. False hope sidesteps reality, leaving patients and family members unprepared for tragedy.

When Anna Kyle was in labor, the umbilical cord dropped ahead of the baby, who was deprived of oxygen for critical moments. Mrs. Kyle had an emergency Caesarean section. The baby had to be resuscitated.

The nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit told Mrs. Kyle, of Lonoke, Ark., that her son was a "good baby," because he didn't cry or fuss. Later, when he had developmental delays, her hopes were at war with her nagging fears. But doctors kept saying the child might outgrow them.

Her son, now 5, received a formal diagnosis last year. "Nobody wanted to say, 'Your kid has autism, your kid is mentally retarded, your kid will be in diapers most of his life,' " said Mrs. Kyle, whose husband earns $10 an hour as a truck driver. "It hurts, it's nasty, ugly stuff, but it has to be said, so kids can get the therapy they need as early as possible."

Because patients hunger for good news, experts say that doctors should choose their words carefully: "If you get into the language of hope, you run the risk of over-promising things," said Dr. Lerner of Columbia.

The more useful discussion for patients, he added, is, "what hopeful things can I do?"

In his November lecture on hope, Dr. Cassell said that patients do not need "false hope that is personified in useless therapy with nontherapeutic effect."

False hope is both a hangover from the centuries-old belief that doctors should withhold bad news, and a practice newly infused by the explosion of so many medical treatments and the tenuous promise held out by clinical trials.

Consider the cost of false hope, experts note: not only the physical and emotional agony of dying patients who try last-ditch, occasionally unproven treatments, but also the depletion, financially and psychologically, of the patients' survivors.

"The battle cry of our culture is, 'Don't just stand there - do something!' " said Dr. Richard Deyo, a Seattle internist and professor at the University of Washington who writes about the high cost of false hope.

He added, "Physicians have a natural bias for action, whereas it may be more honest to say, 'Whether I do something or not, the result is likely to be the same.' "

A 1994 study showed that Americans have greater faith in medical advances than people in many other countries. Thirty-four percent of Americans believed that modern medicine "can cure almost any illness for people who have access to the most advanced technology and treatment." By contrast, only 11 percent of Germans held the same belief.

Accompanying the medical advances, however, are an increasing number of physician subspecialties. One downside is that patients hear from a variety of voices, and they can become inadvertently misled.

Pat Murphy, a nurse and grief counselor who heads the family support team at University Hospital in Newark, said that, for example, when a patient has a critical stroke, a cardiologist, among others, will be called in for an evaluation: "The doctor might say, 'This is a strong heart' and then he leaves," she said. "The patient will probably never regain consciousness. But the 'parts people' talk to the family out of context, and the family thinks they're hearing good news."

Another result of this medical renaissance is thousands of clinical trials. Phase 1 trials often try out doses of an unapproved drug; perhaps only 5 percent of volunteers may derive any benefit. "Most people think they don't want to be an experiment," said George J. Annas, author of "The Rights of Patients." But, he said, when desperately ill patients learn about a trial, "all of a sudden there's no difference in their minds between research and treatment."

A 2003 study of advanced-stage cancer patients who volunteered for Phase I trials showed that at least three-quarters of them were convinced they had a 50 percent chance or greater of being helped by the drug.

Because patients listen selectively, it can be difficult to tease out who owns responsibility for false hope:

Patricia Mendell, a New York psychotherapist who works with fertility patients, noted: "A doctor can tell a patient she has a 95 percent chance of an I.V.F. cycle not working. But the patient will feel it's her right to try for that 5 percent. "

Indeed, false hope can represent a complex entwining between terrified patient and well-intended doctor: both want the best outcome, sometimes so intensely that what emerges is a collective denial about the patient's condition.

Hope

Elissa J. Levy was a winter sports jock, with a buoyant social circle and a power job on Wall Street. But in January 2002, she received a diagnosis of secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, a less common version of the disease, for which there are few treatments and no known cures.

Soon, Ms. Levy needed a cane, and could scarcely walk a block. Pain and fatigue dogged her. Her quick brain grew foggy, her right hand floppy. She cut back her new job as a deputy director of a Bronx charter school to three days a week. In the mornings, her mother had to help dress her.

But though her body sagged, her neurologist helped prop up her spirits. "Often I would come in crying," Ms. Levy said, "and he would hold my hand and say, 'We'll figure this out together.' Or 'We can hope that this treatment works.' "

Given the gravity of her disease, was it appropriate for the doctor to stoke her hope?

"Hope," wrote Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul."

Imprecise and evanescent, hope is almost universally considered essential to the business of being human.

Few can define hope: Self-delusion? Optimism? Expectation? Faith?

And that, say experts from across a wide spectrum, is the point: hope means different things to different people. When someone's medical condition changes, that person's definition of hope changes. A hope for a cure can morph into a hope that a relationship can be mended. Or that one's organs will be eligible for donation.

For so many, hope and faith are inextricably linked. "Truly spiritual people are amazing, " said Ms. Murphy of University Hospital. "Until the moment of death, families pray for a miracle and then at the moment of the death, they say, 'This is God's will' and 'God will get us through this.' "

As health care providers struggle with whether, how and when doctors should speak of hope, a consensus is building on at least two fronts: that what fundamentally matters is that a doctor tells the truth with kindness, and that a doctor should never just say, "I have nothing more to offer you."

More doctors are embracing palliative care specialists as partners who work with critically ill patients and their families to help them redefine their hopes, from the improbable to the possible. Many doctors, whose specialties range from neurosurgery to infertility, retain therapists to counsel patients.

"Hope lives inside a patient and the physician's behavior can either bring it out or suppress it," said Dr. Susan D. Block, a palliative care leader at Harvard. "When a patient has goals, it's impossible to be hopeless. And when a physician can help a patient define them, you feel like a healer, even when the patient is dying."

Dr. Spiegel, the Stanford psychiatrist, recalled a woman who knew her death from cancer was imminent: "She had 15-minute appointments scheduled all day with relatives, to set them straight on how to live their lives. Then she was going to die. This was a hopeful woman."

Harvard's medical school matches first-year students with critically ill patients - in essence, the patients become the teachers. One patient, Dr. Block recalled, was a high school teacher dying from lymphoma, who agreed with alacrity to participate. When her husband came into her room, the patient said, with tears in her eyes, "Honey, I have one last teaching gig."

Last April, Ms. Levy's doctor started her on a drug that is still in clinical trials, but has long been available in Europe. Shortly after she began taking the daily pill, she went for a checkup and lay down on his examining table.

He asked her to lift her leg.

Normally, Ms. Levy struggled to budge her leg. But having taken the drug, she flung her leg into a 90-degree angle. She gasped.

Usually, when her doctor pressed one finger against her leg, it collapsed. Now he pushed with his open hand. She held steady. Both she and her doctor grew teary-eyed.

Finally, she walked down the hall without her cane. Both patient and doctor wept openly.

The drug does not cure her disease; it treats symptoms. But Ms. Levy, 37, now walks 20 blocks at a clip, works four days a week, goes to the gym. She is dating. A recent test showed that her disease has not progressed.

In a sense, Ms. Levy's relationship with her doctor combined the best of the old and new worlds. He was hopeful but also candid. And he could offer her promising treatments, including one that, at least temporarily, seems to help.

"And if I start feeling bad again?" Ms. Levy said. "I have hope that I'll feel good again."

The average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read.

The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.

When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.

The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.

Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.

"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.

Among blacks and Asians, English literacy increased from 1992 to 2003.

About 29 percent of blacks scored at either the intermediate or proficient levels in 1992, but in 2003, those rose to 33 percent. The percentage of blacks demonstrating "below basic" literacy declined to 24 percent from 30 percent.

Asians scoring at either the intermediate or proficient levels rose to 54 percent from 45 percent in 1992.

The same period saw big declines in Hispanics' English reading skills. In 1992, 35 percent of Hispanics demonstrated "below basic" English literacy, but by 2003 that segment had swelled to 44 percent. And at the higher-performing end of the literacy scale, the proportion of Hispanics demonstrating intermediate or proficient English skills dropped to 27 percent from 33 percent in 1992.

"These are big shifts," said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the Department of Education that gave the test.

"The Hispanic population in 2003 is radically different than in 1992, and many of the factors that have changed for Spanish-language immigrants make learning English more difficult," Mr. Schneider said. "They are arriving later, staying in the U.S. for a shorter period, and fewer are speaking English at home."

The 2003 test was administered to 19,000 people 16 and older, in homes, college housing and in prisons.

A test conducted in homes across New York State in conjunction with the 2003 national test found that New Yorkers were less literate in English than their national counterparts. Eleven percent of New Yorkers performed at the proficient level in reading prose texts, compared with 13 percent nationally. And 19 percent of New Yorkers scored "below basic," while only 14 percent performed that poorly across the nation.

I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees?

A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution.

His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.

The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.

Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.

The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.

The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.

The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.

The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."

It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children.

I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab.

Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking about atoms and princesses.

Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab, led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil.

Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.

At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box.

He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted.

A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.

But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.

Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.

"She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.

If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.

Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said.

We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."

In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.

Prom night, that all-American rite of passage that fell out of favor during the anti-establishment 1960's and then made a comeback in the conservative tilt of the Reagan era, probably always inhabited terrain destined to become a battleground in the so-called culture wars.

It is about social manners, class, gender roles; and to a more or less open degree, it is about sex.

That may explain why recent decisions by two Roman Catholic high school principals on Long Island to cancel proms for the class of 2006 - both citing exasperation with what the educators described as a decadent "prom culture" - seem to have struck a chord well beyond the worlds of Catholics, high schools or Long Island.

Newspaper editorial writers, social scientists and parents across the country linked through Web sites have responded in the past two months with what seems like a giant exhalation of relief, as if someone had finally said what they had long feared to say.

"Strike up the orchestra for Brother Kenneth Hoagland, principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School in Uniondale, N.Y.," read an Oct. 23 editorial in The Chicago Tribune. "Not because he has canceled the Long Island school's spring prom but because in doing so he provoked what should be local discussions nationwide about prom night activities and about parents and educators who don't do their jobs."

Underlying the concern seems to be a widespread uncertainty about the coming-of-age ritual embodied in the modern prom - the $500 to $1,000 spent on dress, limo and parties before and after the actual event. It has become not uncommon for parents to sign leases for houses, where couples room together, for post-prom weekend events or for parents to authorize boat excursions in which under-age drinking is not just winked at but expected.

Trumping it all, of course, is the uncertainty about sex.

"Common parlance tells us that this is a time to lose one's virginity," Brother Hoagland and other administrators of Kellenberg High wrote in a letter to parents in March, warning them that the prom might be canceled unless parents stopped financing what, in effect, the school considered bacchanals. "It is a time of heightened sexuality in a culture of anything goes," the letter added. "The prom has become a sexual focal point. This is supposed to be a dance, not a honeymoon."

Six months after the initial letter, administrators canceled the prom by fiat, citing not just sex and alcohol use, but also what they described as materialism run amok.

A month later, in November, administrators at another Roman Catholic school on Long Island, Chaminade High School in Mineola, followed suit, explaining that the prom was being canceled because its decadence and "showcase of affluence" were "opposed to our value system."

Both principals reported receiving letters of support and requests for interviews from all over the world. British, Australian, Japanese and Ukrainian newspapers, for instance, ran prominent features about the principals' bold stand against American decadence.

Whether those "local discussions nationwide" urged by The Chicago Tribune lead to a larger consensus about proms, or remain small countercultural acts in what has become a $2.7 billion prom industry, some observers viewed them as opening an interesting new front in the continuing battle over American values.

"I think there is a general desire to bring religious values into public life, and these actions against the prom seem like signs of that," said John Farina, a researcher at Georgetown University who studies the intersection of religion and culture. "To some extent, it reflects the influence of John Paul II - his willingness to confront and resist the dominant culture. As a teacher, I wish more educators had that kind of backbone."

An opposing view was expressed by George M. Kapalka, a professor of psychological counseling at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J.

Resisting unacceptable behavior and banning it, he said, represent two different spirits in education. "This is just another example of the 'just say no' policy, which has failed miserably wherever it's been applied," Professor Kapalka said. "It would be better to start the conversation with kids about values earlier than to wait until senior year and ban the prom."

Among disappointed students, there was a sense that the timing of the ban was arbitrary.

"It was like a slap in the face," said Shane Abrams, a 17-year-old Chaminade senior. "A lot of kids feel like: 'Why us? Why this year?' Why didn't they ban the prom last year, or the year before?"

Countering the charges of prom extravagance, a number of students pointed out that the school was spending about $20 million on an athletic center, an expense they said was extravagant, also.

Chaminade's headmaster, the Rev. James Williams, said the decision to cancel the senior prom this year was based on an accumulation of evidence that "the modern culture of the prom has become toxic and beyond remediation."

He added: "It's part of a larger issue. Why are sweet 16 parties becoming more like weddings? Why are otherwise moderate kids suddenly pressured to go wild on one night at the end of four years of Chaminade education?

"We are saying we admit that this takes place, and we won't be part of it anymore."

William J. Doherty, a professor of family studies at the University of Minnesota and author of "Take Back Your Kids," a study about overscheduled children, said in a phone interview that prom excesses like those cited by Brother Hoagland and Father Williams were typical of what he calls "consumer-driven parenting."

"We have parents heavily involved in orchestrating their children's experience because of this notion that experiences can be purchased," Dr. Doherty said. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, he said, he knew of one mother who did not want her daughter to go on a senior class trip to Cancun, but would not forbid it. "Her comment was 'how sad' it would be if her daughter was the only one at her lunch table to miss that experience.

"It's not that a whole generation of parents is crazy," Dr. Doherty said. "It's that there is a subset of parents who are crazy - and the rest don't want their kids to miss out."

Prom night may never replace abortion on the front line of the culture wars, but in small increments, the issue of prom night does seem to be forcing itself onto the agenda generally described as family values.

Web sites ranging from those of the conservative Concerned Women for America to the nonpartisan Berkeley Parents Network, to those of various Islamic and Orthodox Jewish organizations, have in recent years posted advice to parents about proms, most of it highly cautionary.

In 2002, after several students who attended a junior prom were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, the administrators at Rye High School in Westchester County began a dialogue with students and parents about how to proceed. One option was to cancel the prom.

"But we came up with a compromise," said Jim Rooney, the principal.

Since 2003, Rye students attending the prom have to report to school that evening with at least one parent. The parent must sign a consent form and leave a phone number where he or she can be reached. All students then travel on a coach bus, provided by the school, to and from the prom - no limos, no sneaking drinks.

"The before-prom gathering has become a nice tradition," Mr. Rooney said. "The parents and kids gather in our courtyard for pictures, and I don't think the kids would give that up for anything, at this point."

On the other hand, he admitted, the school has no control over what happens after the prom bus drops seniors off back at the school. After-prom parties happen. It is almost assumed that students will seek memorable experiences according to their own standards.

"A lot of them go off to these Chelsea bars," Mr. Rooney said. "I understand that most of those places are quite porous."

Filed at 10:40 p.m. ET

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- When Steven Hawks is tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn't pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart.

It's the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years.

Hawks calls his plan ''intuitive eating'' and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted.

As part of intuitive eating, Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what's taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge.

There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full.

That means not eating a box of chocolates when you're feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is.

The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart desires when you are actually hungry.

''One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you're always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it's there and tastes good,'' he said. ''Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside. I don't have anywhere near the cravings I would as a 'restrained eater.'''

Hawks should know. In 1989, the Utah native had a job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and wanted to return to his home state. But at 210 pounds, he didn't think a fat person could get a job teaching students how to be healthy, so his calorie-counting began.

He lost weight and got the job at Utah State University. But the pounds soon came back.

For several years his weight fluctuated, until he eventually gave up on being a restrained eater and the weight stayed on.

''You definitely lose weight on a diet, but resisting biological pressures is ultimately doomed,'' Hawks said.

Several years later and still overweight at a new job at BYU, Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change.

He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn't hungry.

Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped.

His friends and co-workers soon took notice of the slimmer Hawks.

''It astonished me, actually,'' said his friend, Steven Peck. ''We were both very heavy. It was hard not to be struck.''

After watching Hawks lose and keep the weight off for a year and a half, Peck tried intuitive eating in January.

''I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd,'' said Peck, who is an assistant professor at BYU.

But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.

''There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving,'' Peck said. ''That's one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. ... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor.''

The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food, said Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California. Ultimately, that's why they usually fail, he said.

''At some point you want what you can't have,'' Goran said. Still, he said intuitive eating makes sense as a concept ''if you know what you're doing.''

Intuitive eating alone won't give anyone six-pack abs, Hawks said, but it will lead to a healthier lifestyle. He still eats junk food and keeps a jar of honey in his office, but only indulges occasionally.

''My diet is actually quite healthy. ... I'm as likely to eat broccoli as eat a steak,'' he said. ''It's a misconception that all of a sudden a diet is going to become all junk food and high fat,'' he said.

In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students.

He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders.

''Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories, restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message,'' he said. ''I think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive eating will be adopted at a national level.''

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On the Net:

National Institute for Intuitive Eating www.intuitiveeating.com

ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."

"Nothing was ever proven," the biography added.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

The case triggered extensive debate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information.

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed, found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits.

He could have filed a lawsuit against BellSouth, he wrote, but only a subpoena would compel BellSouth to reveal the name.

In the end, Mr. Seigenthaler decided against going to court, instead alerting the public, through his article, "that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Mr. Wales said in an interview that he was troubled by the Seigenthaler episode, and noted that Wikipedia was essentially in the same boat. "We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites," he said.

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site's strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, "The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources."

Jessica Baumgart, a news researcher at Harvard University, wrote that there were librarians voluntarily working behind the scenes to check information on Wikipedia. "But, honestly," she added, "in some ways, we're just as fallible as everyone else in some areas because our own knowledge is limited and we can't possibly fact-check everything."

In an interview, she said that her rule of thumb was to double-check everything and to consider Wikipedia as only one source.

"Instead of figuring out how to 'fix' Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction," wrote Derek Willis, a research database manager at The Washington Post, who was speaking for himself and not The Post, "we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues."

Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected."

Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may, in that sense, be better than real life.

"The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss," she said. "Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can't be questioned."

For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."

IT often begins with a low, unwelcome groan from deep within the stomach. Soon lethargy sets in. Some people suffer headaches, others feel dizzy. But of all the unsavory symptoms of hunger there is one that is especially dreaded, for it affects not only the person who is famished but unsuspecting co-workers, friends and lovers too. In a word: crankiness.

Hunger-induced meltdowns have long been staples in the behavioral repertory of babies and children. But some people never outgrow the habit. Countless adults admit to being irritable, even hostile, when they are hungry, not unlike the belligerent plant that routinely bellowed "Feed me!" in "Little Shop of Horrors." And judging by the amount of attention this moody side effect is getting nowadays, the number of people who are not weaned from snack time may be increasing.

"I'm sorry, I was hungry" has become a culturally acceptable way to apologize for brusque behavior. Chelsea Gay, 29, who works in communications in Toronto, said she relies on it from time to time. "Once I identified those symptoms," Ms. Gay said, "I was able to say: 'I'm really hungry right now and I'm really sorry. Just give me half an hour and I'll be fine.' "

In an age of electronic navel gazing, when people blog about their every emotion, the hunger-mood connection has been able to be fully expressed and, one might say, feed on itself. Thousands have told their cranky hunger stories online, from a famished driver who admitted to cursing at other motorists, to a woman who wrote that her honeymoon might have been an affair to forget had she not packed snacks.

Bloggers often describe their "current mood" as "hungry," while those too grumpy for words use hunger emoticons, like a yellow smiley face outfitted with a fork, knife and checkered bib.

A new vocabulary has evolved around victual despair, with the afflicted referring to their nasty moods as "food swings." Those who say their hunger frequently morphs into anger describe themselves as "hangry." And the word "hunger" itself seems to have taken on new meaning. No longer merely a physiological state, it is now also thought of as a mood.

"We certainly hear it enough," said Dr. Edward Saltzman, a nutrition scientist, referring to the increasing chatter about food swings. "I think it's a pretty legitimate phenomenon. It's not an excuse for ill-tempered behavior, but certainly hunger does affect mood."

Nutrition scientists, including Dr. Saltzman, who is at the United States Department of Agriculture's Nutrition Research Center at Tufts University in Boston, say the increasing awareness of hunger's sullen side effects may be in part a byproduct of society's growing obsession with food and dieting. Talking about it, the hungry and crabby say, even warning friends and family to steer clear, gives them a chance to mine the dark humor in their frustration - and to cope without resorting to cursing, weeping or assaulting a candy machine.

Some people use their hunger as a verbal Get Out of Jail Free card. "Maybe I kind of enjoy the excuse to be cranky," said Fernanda Gilligan, a 28-year-old photo editor from Manhattan.

Yet many mercurial eaters do not stop at words. They try to control hunger-provoked dramas by scheduling their lives around their next meal. They stock drawers, purses and briefcases as if they were kitchen cupboards to ensure that sustenance is always within reach. For some, a granola bar has become as essential as a cellphone.

Anna Yarbrough, 26, a teacher in Boston, squirrels away nibble-friendly fare like string cheese, pretzels, apples and trail mix in her purse and desk drawer. If she and her husband have late dinner reservations, she snacks beforehand. A recent trip to a Celtics game required eating before tipoff and again when she got home. On her wedding day in October she was relieved to learn that there would be food at the hair salon.

"It's a conscious thing that I think about," Ms. Yarbrough said. "It can ruin a day or an experience if food is not available to me."

Dictionaries define hunger simply as a need for food or a physiological response to a lack of it. Hunger pangs are contractions of the stomach that occur when it is empty, according to Dale A. Schoeller, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. But people have many ways of describing the feeling of mild hunger that sets them on edge. Some say it is a craving or an overall feeling of weakness that overcomes them when they have not eaten for several hours. Others describe it as an unspecified desire for more energy.

The link between hunger and irritability has never been examined in any systematic, scientific way, said Mark Friedman, an associate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, which conducts research on taste and smell.

But science has noted that many creatures become more alert when they are deprived of food. The praying mantis, for example, which normally tracks only prey it can easily see, will use its peripheral vision and track prey farther away when it has not eaten for a while.

"Your sensitivity to your external environment increases," Dr. Friedman said. "These sorts of needs open sensory gates." That may be why, he said, "someone playing music in the apartment below may be more irritating when you're hungry than when you're not."

In a study released in 1999, Dr. Friedman observed that as people grew hungrier, their discomfort expanded within their stomachs and in some cases to other parts of their bodies. People who initially described feeling hunger in the pit of their stomachs, for example, would in time "feel" the hunger in their heads. Some also reported a slight increase in anxiety.

"When you're hungry, it becomes a big part of your life," Dr. Friedman said.

"Incidentally," he added, "I get crabby when I'm hungry. One of my students confessed to me that the students knew not to see me right before lunch."

In general men do not seem to suffer hunger-related moods as frequently as women do, or at least they are not as likely to admit it. Ms. Gay, of Toronto, describes herself as normally "jovial and friendly." But her boyfriend pointed out that when she got hungry, she got mean. "He would just be like, 'You're hungry. Stand back. Don't hurt me,' " she said.

Ms. Gay said she makes sure to keep fruit bars in her handbag. "I don't want to get to that point where I'm grumpy or angry at people," she said.

At work about a half dozen of Ms. Gay's female colleagues designated an afternoon snack time, so they could all weather their food swings together.

Ms. Gilligan and her friends refer to hunger-induced hostility as "the cranks." The men in Ms. Gilligan's life have never understood why she suffers food swings, she said, adding that she has broken up with boyfriends because of it. She has since come to the conclusion that food swings are "a girl thing."

But why would more women than men be afflicted? "Offhand I can't think of any good, sound biological reason," Dr. Saltzman said. He speculated that the people who say they have food swings are eating smaller meals and therefore need to eat more frequently or that "psychologically they may have a lower threshold" for hunger.

Lisa Sasson, a clinical assistant professor in New York University's department of nutrition, food studies and public health, said weight consciousness might explain why more women report hunger-related moodiness. Women, she said, sometimes feel that if they are satiated - if their bellies bulge the tiniest bit beyond flatness - then they may have overeaten. Some women think that if they feel full, then they "haven't been good," Ms. Sasson said.

Fighting food swings by eating small amounts of food throughout the day is not necessarily a bad idea, she said, as long as the snacks are healthful: foods like nuts, fruit, cheese and hummus.

On the other hand, Ms. Sasson said, some women's heightened awareness of their own eating habits may make them go overboard, incorrectly linking every mood to hunger. Sleep deprivation and dehydration can also make people irritable, she noted.

Much depends on what is put into the body, and when. A diet rich in protein, fat and fiber will help stave off hunger, Ms. Sasson said. The body also adjusts to habitual eating patterns, Dr. Friedman said, so if you eat only three meals, you create a feeding and fasting cycle that routinely makes you feel hungry at those three times a day.

Dr. Saltzman said food swings may be harder to conquer if they are based not on physical hunger but on "emotional hunger," which is triggered by stress, sadness, depression or even boredom. Emotional hunger is harder to satisfy, he said, because "you can eat and overeat and still not feel sated."

Cherie Millns, 30, who writes a food blog named Kitschenette from Switzerland, calls food swings "super-grumpy-mummy syndrome." Her husband, she wrote in an e-mail message, complains mostly about the copious snacks and drinks that she is habitually toting around as well as the number of snack stops she requests. "But they are essential," she wrote, "otherwise we spend the whole time with three-fourths of the family either in sullen silence or irritable-whingy-shouty mode."

To be fair, Ms. Millns's husband had been warned. "My mother told my husband before we got married to make sure he always carried a banana with him, in case of a sudden cranky-pants emergency," Ms. Millns wrote. "It might just save his life."