Have you looked at Tronicks's Face-to-Face Still Face Paradigm? We have used it with children and their mothers at 3 and 6 months and it provides a way to look at both child reactivity and maternal soothing behavior post arousal, plus it's easy for both behavioral and cardiac data collection.

Thanks for Your response. Can you provide a reference to your work where you have used the Still-face paradigm as described above?

Contact Dr. David Hayley at U of T - through this site he is registered - and he has a number of publications in these exact areas.

Thank you, and happy New year!!

Monica, do you wish to use this for research or for clinical work? Although it is only valid for the first month of life, the NICU Neurobehavioral Network Scale was devised for both and specifically for drug exposed infants. I have also found the Behavioral Rating Scales from the Bayley very good, with a specific subscale for regulation.

Also, although they are under the rubric of temperament, many of the scales measuring temperament have many regulatory items, especially the IBQ. The book I co-edited, The Biobehavioral Assessment of the Infant also reviews these and other measures of infant functioning.

We are looking for instruments to use in an upcoming grant application to a study of substance-exposed infants. Our aim is to recruit infants from 6 hospitals in Norway which all have some experience with the study group. I am aware of the NNNS as an excellent tool, but the use of this requires amounts of training which we cannot expect the clinicians to have (or acquire). Thus, the challenge is to find objective measures of infant (regulatarory) behavior which is 1) easy to record 2) yield valid information 3) can be administered by health personel (f.x nurses). The BRS is a good idea and I will also check up the measures outlined in your book. Thanks again and please stay in touch!