REMARKABLE RESEARCHPSYCHOLOGY FOOD CAN BE LOVE

People eat to cope with negative emotions and achieve a more positive emotional state. So besides satisfying physiological needs (hunger), food can also satisfy psy-chological needs. Research by Jordan D. Troiso and Shira Gabriel now shows that eating such ‘comfort food’ also helps us to cope with feelings of loneliness.

People have an innate ‘need to belong’: We are motivated to affiliate with others and be socially accepted. When we feel left out, this has negative consequences for our well-being and self-esteem and can even lead to depres-sion. But how can such a simple act as eating a bowl of soup help and how come food is in-stilled with this symbolic meaning?

Food is thought to receive its symbolic mean-ing because it was repeatedly consumed in a social environment. Therefore, foods can become symbols for belonging. In addition, the presence of comfort food automatically activates the experience of the psychologi-cal comfort that was initially encoded along with the food. To test this hypothesis, Troisi and Gabriel invited two groups of participants into their lab. Group 1 consisted of those par-ticipants who thought chicken soup was a comfort food, while the other group did not perceive chicken soup as such. Of course, participants did not know they were selected based on these scores. When in the lab, half of the participants received a bowl of chicken soup to eat while sitting alone in their cubicle.

Next, both groups engaged in a ‘Word Stem Completion Task’. In this task, participants re-ceive word fragments (stems) and are asked to construe actual words out of them. Partici-pants who ate the soup and thought of chick-en soup as a comfort food were more likely to construe relationship-words (e.g., ‘welcome’, ‘liking’) compared to those who did not eat soup and those who did not think of chicken soup as a comfort food. In their second ex-periment, participants in the ‘belongingness threat condition’ had to write for 6 minutes about a fight with someone close to them while the others just listed items found in their house. Next, participants were instructed to write about either the experience of eating a comfort food or the experience of trying a new food.

The final part of the experiment consisted of a measure of felt loneliness. Results showed that participants who are ‘securely attached,’ meaning they view their relationships in a positive way, and who wrote about comfort food, reported the lowest levels of loneliness compared to participants who did not write about comfort food and who are insecurely attached. For the subject who claimed to be ‘insecurely attached’, writing about comfort food had an adverse effect: they reported the highest levels of felt loneliness. The research by Troisi and Shira was published in the Jour-nal Psychological Science.