Comfort Food

Social Surrogates

Nothing is as practical as a good theory. (Lewin, 1945, p. 129)

Social surrogates can take many forms. Previous research has shown that some social surrogates fulfill belongingness needs by allowing individuals to enter into other social worlds, such as those of their favorite television programs (Derrick, Gabriel, & Hugenberg, 2009) or literary narratives (Mar & Oatley, 2008). These connections, which help people assimilate the traits of those television or literary characters (Gabriel & Young, 2011), can help reduce feelings of loneliness (Derrick et al., 2009). The findings on this topic also suggest that just viewing any television program or narrative does not seem to produce these effects; only favored sources of media seem to produce the outcomes.

Another type of social surrogate, often referred to as a “one-sided” or “parasocial” relationship (Horton & Wohl, 1956), allows people to derive a sense of belonging through their “connections” with favorite television characters (Gardner & Knowles, 2008), celebrities (Derrick, Gabriel, & Tippin, 2008), and other media figures (Cohen, 2006). Recent work on this phenomenon has supported a counterintuitive finding: Unlike what many people expect, parasocial relationships with television characters and celebrity figures can provide some significant psychological benefits. For example, parasocial relationships help people with lower self-esteem move closer to their ideal self-conception (Derrick et al., 2008). Additionally, these parasocial relationships also help protect against negative perceptions of one’s body. Men’s parasocial relationships with favored film superheroes (Young, Gabriel, & Hollar, 2013) and women’s parasocial relationships with favored celebrities (Young, Gabriel, & Sechrist, 2012) lead these individuals to assimilate the desired qualities they see in their parasocial partners. This research refutes past work, which has indicated that exposure to celebrities and the idealized bodies of characters in the media tends to be corrosive for body image (see Grabe, Ward, & Hyde, 2008). Here, again, the pervasive need to connect to others seems to be surprisingly powerful and creates novel questions for understanding how people function in the social world.

Given past research on social surrogates, my colleagues and I began to wonder if comfort food might also function in the same way. The term “comfort food” seems to have been in use since sometime before 1977, when it first appeared in the American vernacular to describe foods that satiate not only physical but also emotional needs (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2010). But the idea of comfort food had probably been around much longer and was probably built into humans’ psychological functioning. My colleagues and I wanted to know more specifics. We had a hunch that comfort food was probably influenced by geography, culture, traditions, and personal experiences, as Harris (1985) suggested. But it would take some empirical investigations to support that contention.

While earning my doctorate, some of my mentors introduced me to McGuire’s (1973) tips for how to generate research ideas—which I now share with all students who take my courses or who do research in my laboratory. Although McGuire provided a tremendous and specific set of suggestions on this list, there was an undercurrent that was pervasive throughout many of them. That undercurrent was to make an effort to account for paradoxes or conflicting ideas. Some of these conflicts are between lay understandings of the world and research-based or empirical understandings of the world, and some of them are conflicts between existing theoretical perspectives that have not been reconciled. To me, these types of conflicts make a research question interesting. These conflicts allow scholars to reconcile competing ideas and to build new knowledge on a topic. It was with this approach that I started to examine the topic of comfort food.

Comfort Food Research Findings and Implications

The research literature and the general public seem to be of two minds when it comes to comfort food. On the one hand, many people assume that comfort food is merely food that is unhealthy in nature—devoid of nutritional value or high in fat, calories, or carbohydrates. In fact, some research on anxiety-related responses among rats has operationally defined foods high in calories as comfort foods (e.g., Ortolani, Oyama, Ferrari, Melo, & Spadari-Bratfisch, 2011). On the other hand, many people assume that comfort food is something traditional, cultural, regional, familial, or otherwise imbued with meaning (e.g., Birch, Zimmerman, & Hind, 1980; Wansink, Cheney, & Chan, 2003). Most likely, there are bits of truth in both of these assumptions, but my colleagues and I were looking for a clearer answer than assumptions would provide. At the time we were thinking about these ideas, my colleagues’ past research had found, for example, that perceived social ties to celebrities (Derrick et al., 2008) and to favorite television shows (Derrick et al., 2009) could make people feel socially connected. With our interest in belongingness and in the social value of nonhuman entities, we started to wonder, might the comfort of comfort food emerge from its connection to people in our lives?

In a first pair of studies (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011), we found support for this second conceptualization of comfort food—that comfort food seemed cognitively linked to ideas related to relationships (perhaps akin to treasured photographs and personal mementos; see Gardner, Pickett, & Knowles, 2005). Using a 2 × 2 experimental paradigm, we demonstrated that those who considered chicken soup to be a comfort food (compared to those who did not) showed greater activation of the belongingness concept in a word-completion task after they had the chance to consume chicken soup.

We extended this finding with a second study on the topic of loneliness, in which we measured participants’ attachment styles, had them write about a fight with a close other (or a neutral writing task), and then gave them a chance to write about a comfort food (or new food). We measured attachment styles in this second study because much previous research has found that threats to belongingness activate the otherwise dormant attachment system (Mikulincer, Birnbaum, Woddis, & Nachmias, 2000; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). We also assumed that comfort foods would serve as a memory-based link to close others and that those with secure attachment styles would have favorable associations with foods associated with other people. After all, for people with strong relationships, reminders of those relationships should lead them to feel less lonely. Our results were in line with our expectations. The opportunity to write about a comfort food buffered feelings of loneliness after writing about a fight with a close other, but only for participants with a secure attachment style and, thus, stronger relationships with others. There were no, however, effects on mood more generally (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011). These findings led us to believe that comfort food had “social utility”—it served as a memory trigger for relational partners.

In a second pair of studies (Troisi, Gabriel, Derrick, & Geisler, 2015), we examined whether the social utility of comfort food altered people’s taste preferences and consumption patterns. Presumably, if comfort food can buffer feelings of loneliness for those with a more secure attachment style, these people should be primed to pursue it. Using an experimental paradigm, we found that securely attached participants who experienced a threatened sense of belonging evaluated the taste of a comfort food much more favorably than their insecure counterparts and those who did not experience a threat to their belonging. Then, in another study, using daily diaries, we found that real-life experiences of loneliness were associated with increased comfort food consumption, but only for those secure in their attachment style (Troisi et al., 2015). Thus, we concluded that people’s mental representations of others (i.e., attachment styles), as well as their current emotional states (i.e., feelings of loneliness), actually dictate the type of foods they consume and their evaluations of the taste of those foods.

This work has offered some surprising and interesting implications. First and foremost, the findings suggest that comfort food is comforting because of its link to the relationship concept. We assume that this link emerges via processes akin to conditioning processes, whereby food items are consistently paired with relational partners and then come to be considered comfort foods, which serve as reminders of those others. This is a striking finding because it speaks to the very significant power of the need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Williams, 2007). So pervasive is this need that people will even attach relational significance to the food items they consume.

Second, these results refute the oversimplified hypothesis that any one particular kind of food item (e.g., sugary foods) should be considered a comfort food (cf. Ortolani et al., 2011). Rather, effects seem to emerge for all different kinds of potential comfort foods—from savory to sweet, from less nutritional to more nutritional, from foods consumed in the laboratory to foods merely reflected upon in an essay. What seems to be the crucial factor is whether participants perceive the foods to be comfort foods, not what the actual foods are.

Third, the findings suggest that comfort foods seem to operate specifically on the belongingness concept and not on mood more generally (cf. Wagner, Ahlstrom, Redden, Vickers, & Mann, 2014). Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly to some, our findings indicate that comfort foods reduce loneliness for those who are securely attached but not for those who are insecurely attached. These secure individuals also consume more comfort foods in general (as evidenced by main effects) and especially when they feel lonely (as evidenced by interaction effects; see Troisi et al., 2015). These findings suggests that how people think about, desire, and evaluate particular foods are influenced by their mental associations and by processes related to social variables.

The (Ongoing) Struggle to Define Comfort Food

Sadly, despite what members of the media or advertising industries may have depicted, it does not seem likely that chronically insecure individuals will gorge themselves on comfort foods after a romantic breakup. If anything, it is the securely attached individuals who are more likely to gorge themselves, and the food they eat may not necessarily be unhealthy. These ideas have been met with shock, and often disbelief, from virtually every member of the press with whom I have discussed these findings. (Incidentally, as a new scholar at the time of these findings’ release, I found that the field of psychology does a very poor job of training researchers to interact with the media. This is an issue that should be rectified in an age where journals and universities are often creating press releases of new research findings.) We have also found that reviewers of our manuscripts also have a hard time accepting our findings, primarily, it seems, because of personal assumptions about the idea of comfort food.

But there is a lesson here—for researchers, teachers, and students alike. The lesson is an old one, one that is at the core of the science of psychology: Look to the data for your answers. Well-executed, empirical studies—not hunches, “common knowledge,” or anecdotal evidence—offer appropriate answers to humans’ immense and insatiable curiosity. In the spirit of groundbreaking researchers and teachers who have refuted many myths about human behavior (e.g., Lilienfeld, Lynn, Ruscio, & Beyerstein, 2009), my exploration into the topic of comfort food has reinvigorated my appreciation for the fact that the beauty and intrigue of psychology is in the search for answers, not in the passive acceptance of assumptions by authority figures. There are many incorrect assumptions about how humans think and behave, and the science of psychology will move us closer to correcting those assumptions.

The Perfect Social Variable (for Teaching)

Eating is the perfect social psychological variable, because it is connected to almost every social variable or process you can think of! (Herman, as cited in Baumeister & Bushman, 2014, p. xxi)

The quotation above, pulled from Baumeister and Bushman’s (2014) social psychology textbook, aptly, but not fully, elucidates the value of using food as a unifying thread across many areas of psychology. In their book, Baumeister and Bushman feature a “Food for Thought” concept in each chapter that examines how food is linked to social psychological processes. Some questions include, “Does chicken soup reduce cold symptoms?” “Is dieting a form of self-regulation?” and “Is binge eating socially contagious?” But I would argue that food, and the relatively new research topic of comfort food, has its place not only in social psychology classes but also in many other psychology classes as well.

Relevant to courses in the psychology of learning, luminaries of the behaviorist tradition, such as Pavlov (1927/1960) and Skinner (1938), used food as a stimulus in their landmark works on classical and operant conditioning. Although their work ended up highlighting behavioral outcomes often unrelated to food, their work solidified food as a primary motivator for their animal subjects (Skinner, 1976). Behaviorism is perhaps not as dominant in psychology as it once was, but even today, in psychology departments all across the world, hungry rats are often running mazes in search of a tasty treat at the far end.

Given the need for humans to consume food in order to maintain numerous homeostatic processes, such topics also seem relevant for courses in biopsychology. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that stressful experiences have numerous biological implications. For example, emotional stressors activate the sympathetic-adrenomedullary and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axes, which then regulate the release of neurotransmitters and hormones associated with utilizing, enduring, and eventually mitigating the stress response (e.g., Blascovich & Mendes, 2000; Shimizu, Seery, Weisbuch, & Lupien, 2011). Thus, feelings of interpersonal connection and loneliness have relevance to aspects of human biological functioning (e.g., Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2014; Dienstbier, 1989; Luo, Hawkley, Waite, & Cacioppo, 2012).

Additionally, motivational theorists such as Maslow (1943) highlighted food consumption as an imperative and perhaps as a necessary condition to satisfy other less crucial needs or desires such as safety or esteem. In my courses, I often discuss food when examining the link between biological and psychological needs, usually beginning with the big picture question, “What are the reasons why we eat?” As a class, we generate a list, and students quickly realize that there are many reasons for food consumption that are largely nonbiological (e.g., because food is pleasurable, to catch up with friends, because it is lunchtime). Additionally, much recent research has indicated that glucose is necessary for self-control resources (e.g., Gailliot et al., 2007), perhaps explaining why hungry students are often less able to stay motivated and pay attention.

Certainly, with the work my colleagues and I have conducted on comfort food, developmental psychology classes seem like a natural place to link discussions to food. Previous research has demonstrated that the frequency of exposure and attention from adults while consuming food shapes children's food preferences (Birch et al., 1980; Sullivan & Birch, 1990). Perhaps this also contributes to the fact that comfort food serves as a meaningful symbol of others and perhaps early relational ties. This idea also lends itself to interesting discussions of easily observable, real-life phenomena such as why we covet and keep certain items from our past (e.g., collectibles, photographs, emotionally significant mementos). Recent research has highlighted how these collections of items are likely based on relational ties (Keefer, Landau, & Sullivan, 2014). Comfort food seems to function in the same way.

The concept of embodiment—a topic in cognitive psychology that has become prominent in the past 10 to 20 years—is also related to findings about comfort food. Theories of embodiment presume that perceptual inputs are recorded in the sensory system of the brain, which captures information about perceived events in both the body and the environment (Barsalou, 1999). As a consequence, recalling this information later involves the conjoined body and environmental experience, because thinking involves perceptual simulation (Schubert, 2005). This is why social exclusion is associated with interpersonal coldness (Williams & Bargh, 2008), the experience of rejection actually makes one feel physically cold (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008), and acetaminophen can alleviate feelings of rejection (DeWall et al., 2010). In addition to cognitive psychology courses, these ideas resonate through courses in social psychology, sensation and perception, cognitive neuroscience, and many others. They also lend themselves nicely to discussions (and to research) on the topic of metaphor (Keefer & Landau, 2015) and to pervasive questions in psychology about the mind–body link.

There are also other courses that focus on current issues in which topics like food and comfort food may be relevant. Certainly, courses on eating behaviors or eating disorders may have topic areas where food consumption, motivation, and emotion are already built into the content. Such courses often do, or could, address topics of overindulgence, coping, media, fast-food culture, portion size, and so on. For such courses, I would also recommend the fascinating book, Mindless Eating (Wansink, 2006), which highlights the many unconscious factors that dictate eating behavior (e.g., the position of food on a shelf). It is a fun read for researchers and nonresearchers alike.

Another activity I have utilized for research-related assignments and in research courses (e.g., research methods, advanced laboratories) entails having students observe phenomena that occur in a college cafeteria. The options for variables are almost limitless (e.g., amount of food items, line queue behavior, seating arrangements), so I let students pick a topic that piques their interest. But as they almost inevitably discover, with such an abundance of variables, there are often many from which to choose, leading them to make tough choices about what they wish to observe—an important lesson for those new to research. Additionally, this assignment requires students to engage in behavioral coding, which often seems intuitive when they are designing a study idea but proves much more difficult when the “noise” of real life is in full force.

Finally, research on comfort food also has implications for broader teaching practices that are not directly tied to traditional course content. Our findings have suggested that food items become associated with people and then serve as a reminder about those people. For example, I am someone who likes to make tea when students come to my office hours. Might it be that students come to associate tea with me, their professor? Perhaps. Might it be that when they consume or come across tea elsewhere in the world, my students think of me? Perhaps. Or what about having students or colleagues over to one’s home for a meal? Might these practices help build the rapport and interpersonal connections that produce high professor evaluations (Richmond, Berglund, Epelbaum, & Klein, 2015; Wilson, Ryan, & Pugh, 2010)? They just might. At my university, there is an informal tradition of inviting students into one’s home to celebrate milestones (e.g., the end of a school year), and it is likely that such a tradition is both memorable and enjoyable for students. Certainly, there are worse things that could occur than a few notable associative links between professors and food or drink.

Future Research Questions and Closing Thoughts

In the spirit of Lewin’s (1945) perspective that good theories should be practical, there are many lingering questions that my colleagues and I are currently pursuing. Given the potential for social surrogates to reduce feelings of loneliness, and because of the frequent comorbidity of loneliness with a number of psychological disorders, a group of colleagues and I have examined the effects of social surrogate use with individuals who have experienced traumatic events or who have symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (Gabriel, Read, Young, Bachrach, & Troisi, 2016). A separate series of studies is examining the ways through which affective priming procedures may be used to alter comfort food preferences, with the ideal result being the potential for people to identify foods high in nutritional value as comfort foods. In yet another study, my colleagues and I are utilizing previous work, suggesting that people who are less lonely are less likely to get sick and experience premature death (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2014; Luo et al., 2012). We are interested to see if social surrogate use has downstream benefits on feelings of mental and physical well-being.

In this article, we have discussed how humans’ fundamental drive for social connection leads them to derive a sense of belonging from social surrogates and from comfort food in particular. Despite common misconceptions, comfort food seems to serve primarily as a cognitive and emotional reminder of others. As a consequence, we encourage future research and teaching innovations that will integrate the science of comfort food into many areas of psychology.