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.