Can Chicken Noodle Soup Soothe the Rejected Soul?

Abstract

The idea that consuming a specific, personally meaningful food, also known as a comfort food, can improve an individual’s mood is ubiquitous in our culture, but recent research findings have been mixed. The purpose of these studies was to determine the effectiveness of comfort food for preventing or diminishing distress caused by social pain, and, because social pain and physical pain are thought to involve the same neural pathways, to also determine the effectiveness of comfort food for preventing physical pain. In Study 1, participants were socially excluded during an online game, and during the study, they received a comfort food to consume or a comfort food as a gift, either before or after the social exclusion task, or they received nothing at all. Participants who consumed a comfort food after being socially rejected were less distressed compared to those in the other conditions. In Study 2, participants were given a comfort food to consume, a comfort food as a gift, or nothing at all and then completed a pressure-pain task. In contrast to the results from the first study, comfort food consumption did not reduce distress or pain perception in Study 2. The results of these studies suggest that comfort food might not reduce an overall negative affect (Wagner et al., 2014), but that it appears to reduce distress caused by social pain. The effectiveness of comfort food was due to actually consuming it, as merely receiving it as a gift to consume later did not reduce distress. Additionally, comfort food was not effective at preventing either social or physical pain.