The original hypotheses, broadly conceived, from Troisi & Gabriel (2012, p. 748).
> In summary, drawing from research on social surrogacy, eating
> behavior, and embodied cognition, we propose that comfort foods are
> social surrogates that derive their unique emotional power from their
> cognitive connections to existing relationships. In two experiments,
> we tested whether comfort foods are associated with relationships and
> can reduce feelings of loneliness.
The original hypotheses, per study, from Troisi & Gabriel (2012, p. 748).
**Study 1 (p. 748):**
> In Experiment 1, we tested our first hypothesis, that comfort foods are associated with relationships
**Study 2 (p. 749):**
> In Experiment 2, we tested our second hypothesis, that comfort food
> can reduce feelings of loneliness, by priming a belongingness threat,
> allowing some participants the opportunity to think of their favorite
> comfort food, and then measuring loneliness. We predicted that
> thinking about comfort food would reduce the effects of the
> relationship threat on loneliness.
**Potential moderators**
Additionally, the original authors suggested to us in an e-mail that their results would replicate in different cultural contexts, as 43% of their participants identified themselves as “Asian” or “Asian-American”.
In addition, they also noted that “comfort food” is something that is idiosyncratically defined. For this reason, we ran a pilot test and made small changes to the methods, which is noted in the method section.