Brooke Feeney has discovered that the same thing that works for crying babies also works for adult couples and for parents and their teenage children.

The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

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Brooke Feeney Residence: Squirrel Hill Position: Psychology professor, Carnegie Mellon University. Education: Bachelor's in psychology, Salisbury University, 1991; master's in psychology, College of William and Mary, 1993; Ph.D. in psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1999 Previous positions: Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Maryland, 1999-2001 Academic honors: The Mind Gym Academic Prize, ($11,900), 2007; Early career award, Relationship Researchers Interest Group of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2005 Publications: Nineteen papers in professional journals; co-author of books on SPSS, a statistical software program The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

Research has shown that when parents pick up crying babies and soothe them, those children cry much less often as time goes on than babies who are left to wail away in their cribs. The children who are picked up also show more security and independence as they grow up.

Dr. Feeney, a social psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, has found the same kind of effect in adults.

In studies of 280 couples who were dating or married, Dr. Feeney's team discovered that the people whose partners responded sensitively and quickly to their feelings of distress were much more likely to feel independent and accomplish personal goals later on than those whose partners were not as good at responding to their needs.

That might seem like a common-sense finding to many, but Dr. Feeney noted that in America and other Western nations that have stressed self-reliance and individualism, "there is still this general belief that yielding to another's expressions of dependence just creates more dependence, so you have to be very careful about that."

Dr. Feeney's paper, published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was striking enough that it made her the first winner of the Mind Gym Academic Awards, a prize set up by a personal improvement organization in Great Britain.

The Mind Gym judges, who selected her paper from more than 100 entrants, said her findings "are relevant to everyone. They challenge the conventional folk psychology which states that being needy puts people off you. So instead of having to fake strength and independence, you can ask for support."

Dr. Feeney, who has been a professor at Carnegie Mellon for six years and describes herself as a "relationship researcher," carried out her experiments with 115 couples who had been dating at least six months, and 165 married couples who ranged in age from 18 to 81.

With both groups, Dr. Feeney interviewed the couples to see how well they felt one partner met the other's needs in times of distress, and then videotaped them interacting with each other. They were also interviewed about the independence and confidence of the person seeking help.

A clear pattern emerged. Those whose partners were best at responding to their emotional needs also felt the most confident and capable of achieving their own goals.

But Dr. Feeney didn't want to rely on interviews and observations alone.

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For the dating couples, part of the experiment involved one partner playing a computer crossword puzzle while the other partner went to a separate room.

Before the game began, the couples would chat with each other through instant messaging on their computers. Once the game began, the researchers secretly took over the IM function and sent messages to the person doing the puzzle.

Some of the puzzle players got "instrumental" messages, such as being told the answers to certain clues. Others got "emotionally supportive" messages like "that's a tough one," or "good job."

The Carnegie Mellon team found that the partners who rated highest on the independence scale were the most aggravated by the instrumental messages.

"They would send messages back to their partners saying 'Stop it' or 'Let me try it on my own,'" she said. "On the other hand, those people were very accepting of messages that were emotionally supportive."

That finding not only was what Dr. Feeney expected to see, but supported another general axiom she has about emotional care giving:

"Advice tends to be the least welcome form of support," she said. "People want it when they request it, but most of the time, if it's not requested, people don't want it."

With the married couples, Dr. Feeney conducted another experiment. Each person who was asked about seeking help from a partner also was asked to list a major personal goal he or she wanted to accomplish six months later.

Many of those goals were about dieting and fitness, she said, while others were focused on career changes or educational achievements.

Once again, the experiment affirmed that the partners who felt the strongest emotional support had the highest rates of achieving their personal goals a half year later.

About 80 percent of those whose partners were strongly supportive accomplished their goals, she said, while only about 45 percent of those with the least supportive partners did so.

Taken together, she said, the two studies demonstrated that "there are two major functions of a relationship partner."

"One is providing a safe haven for your partner so when your partner needs to come in for comfort and reassurance when they're really stressed out, you're there for them with open arms. The other major function of a relationship partner is to provide a secure base, a base from which your partner can go out and explore and discover and accept challenges and do all the things he or she would want to do to feel fulfilled."

Some people are much better at one of those skills than the other, and so "one of the biggest challenges in a relationship is to learn how to balance those two things."

The idea of not picking up a crying baby -- and by extension, not catering to the emotional distress of adults -- came out of the school of psychology known as behaviorism, championed by B.F. Skinner and his disciples after World War II, Dr. Feeney said.

While behaviorists no longer hold sway in psychological circles, the wariness toward emotional demands still shows up in some quarters.

In one of his recent parenting columns, for instance, conservative adviser John Rosemond said he didn't see much difference between leading a family as a parent, and leading a tank battalion, and said good leaders "create boundaries between themselves and the people they lead, knowing that intimate relationships neutralize leadership."

Parents of past generations, he said, did a better job because they "understood, intuitively, that one accomplished the goals of raising a child through leadership, not relationship."

But Dr. Feeney said the research on parents and children has shown that "in order to thrive socially and developmentally, kids need to have caregivers who are sensitive and approachable, especially in times of need.

"And it shows that if you provide that kind of support to your kids, those are the kids who are going to be most likely to go out and accomplish things and have better relationships with adults and their peers."

Being emotionally supportive is not the same as being permissive or co-dependent, she stressed.

"I think being loving and supportive is not independent from being firm and having guidelines and a family-based rule system, which is important for all kids from infancy through adolescence.

"The most secure kids are those who have parents who do set rules and limits, but do so in a loving way."

Limits are important in adult relationships, too, she said.

The challenge, she said, is "how to be responsive to someone's needs but also set appropriate limits. I think people who are overly dependent, it's because they've never had anyone be responsive to their needs and so it's like a vicious cycle" where the person is constantly seeking reassurance.

Dr. Feeney grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland and didn't decide to focus on psychology until her junior year at Salisbury University.

During an intensive master's program at the College of William and Mary, she discovered "attachment theory," developed after World War II by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.

It stresses the importance of strong relationships to overall health, and Dr. Feeney said she was attracted to it right away because "it's a really rich theory that is all-encompassing and explains a lot about people throughout the whole life span."

While attachment theory is now widely known, she said, no one had ever done the kind of real-life experiments on it with adults that her team carried out at Carnegie Mellon.

Her next stage of research will focus on her newlyweds study, which she began with funding from the National Science Foundation two years ago, using 200 newly married couples from the Pittsburgh region.

Dr. Feeney and her colleagues do periodic interviews with the couples, who also keep a daily log of their moods and interactions using Palm Pilots.

Already, some of the couples are divorced, and Dr. Feeney said one of her long-term goals is to find out whether certain factors can predict likely divorces and whether others can foretell stable, growing relationships.

"My goal is to follow them over time to see how they are functioning as a safe haven and secure base for one another, and what sort of individual factors are influencing who is able to do that, and who's not able to negotiate that balance very well."