Will you be eating alone, or meeting someone?

This week marks Costa Mesa's restaurant week, which means it's time for MOH and I to venture out of our favorite food spots and try some of the hidden gems of Costa Mesa. Restaurant week happens in many cities, often highlighting great food from awesome restaurants at an affordable lunch or dinner prix fixe menu.

Yesterday MOH and I went to Pie-not, this Australian bakery that serves delicious savory pies.

Beautiful pies (courtesy of J. Spengler)

Pie-not had this awesome special where you can have their signature pie with a cookie and coffee all for 8 bucks. I would definitely recommend this place - the pies are crusty, have a great buttery taste, and have such a decadent savory filling. The pie that I had was the gandhi which had curried chickpeas and vegetables - super good! And if you're not into pies, get the Digger biscuit, which tastes like a crispy oatmeal cookie - really delicious and great with a cup of coffee. Our experience yesterday was a great start to restaurant week, and we're excited to try other places. We've compiled a list of a few places, but we'll be lucky if we can hit all our spots. Fingers crossed!

The great thing about restaurant week is you can plan girls' nights or date nights or catch-up with friends and family at great places to eat. It's always a lot of fun when you can spend time with loved ones, especially over good food. And if you're like me, a total "awkward turtle," a new study recently published in Plos One (Sommer et al., 2013) has shown that eating in the company of another person compared to eating solo helps you become more in tune with reading other people's emotions and serves to enhance your mood. Talk about being productive on all ends.

This study was conducted by researchers in Madrid and Germany and looked at the cognitive and emotional consequences of eating alone, or eating with another person in a restaurant setting. While there's been mounting empirical as well as anecdotal evidence for the benefits of eating with company, no studies have actually explored the realm of how cognitive processes are affected between the two eating habits. Here, they compared two types of groups: eating restaurant prepared take-out inside an office cubicle versus walking to said restaurant with a coworker and having a meal inside the restaurant. Only the social factor of eating with company was considered different between the two groups.

In this study, researchers looked at effects on mood, memory and emotional context between the two groups using an imaging technique known as electroencephalography (EEG). EEG works by taking a summation of all your brain's electrical activity as a way of figuring out which parts of your brain are being stimulated during particular activities. EEG is a really great way to measure brain activity in humans in particular because it's non-invasive and subjects only need to wear a cap with little electrodes (look like plug extensions) that will measure electrical activity.

EEG in action - tres stylish? (photo taken from P. Kallioinen) 

What they found was that people in the experimental group (named EG, the group that dined with a coworker) had a better mood than the control group (named CG, solo eaters). In addition, EG people had an easier ability to detect negative emotions on faces - what they did for this test was present random faces and had the subjects indicate the emotion presented on each face. The EG people responded much quicker and correctly than the CG group. Memory was looked at too, but both groups had similar responses.

Now, crunching down the findings, the mood results seem plausible and even make sense. Think about how great you feel after dining with a friend, or coworker. Maybe you get to vent out your frustrations regarding work or get some sound advice about life; maybe you become inspired to take your research project in a different direction after bouncing off ideas with a fellow colleague; or even maybe you feel secretly excited and happy when you hear from a friend that your ex is wishing they never broke up with you. Either way, dining with another can be a great experience and serious mood uplifter.

Photo courtesy of T. Monto

But what about the results of reading emotions? This came across really interesting to me. If I'm assuming that reading emotional context on faces can be extended to being able to socialize better with various groups, presumably, by eating out with my few select friends, I can potentially enhance my social skills... This sounds like a win-win situation to me. Not sure if we can extrapolate and make this stretch, but if it justifies eating out more, trying different foods, and spending quality time with friends and family, why not?

Hope everyone's enjoying their weekend - until next time, happy eating!


Reference:
Sommer et al., 2013. How about lunch? Consequences of the meal context on cognition and emotion. Plos One.