Summary
The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment attempts to capture the behaviors of the neonate as he defends himself from intrusive, negative stimuli, and controls interfering motor and autonomic responses in order to attend to important social and nonsocial stimuli. In order to conceptualize the 26 behavioral items and 20 reflex scores, four clusters or typologies have been identified which help to reduce the data for analytic purposes with small numbers of subjects. So far few long-term validation studies have been completed, although the scale is in use in many different areas, such as obstetrical medication, predicting to neurological deficits, cross-cultural differences, and with low birth weight infants.
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This work was supported by grant # 7634-4 of the Grant Foundation, New York.
This material appears in expanded form in Osofsky, J. (ed.),Handbook on Infancy, Wiley Interscience, 1977, in press.
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Als, H., Tronick, E., Lester, B.M. et al. The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (BNBAS). J Abnorm Child Psychol 5, 215–229 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00913693
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00913693