Selection and Test of Response Measures in the Study of the Human Newborn

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Abstract
An initial attack on the problems of newborn behavior was made in an examination of the reliability, individual stability, and related-ness of 4 response measures, movement, crying, mouthing, and hand-mouth contacting. Infants were seen repeatedly during the lying-in period. All measures showed very high intersubjective reliability. The measures for movement and hand-mouth contacting were sensitive to individual variation over the first 5 days of life; the measures for crying and mouthing were not. The movement measure showed systematic change over the lying-in period; for the other measures, neither a regular increase nor a regular decrease in occurrence was found, putting in some doubt the suggestion that mouthing and hand-mouth contacting are phenomena secondary to feeding. The relation of the findings to the problem of tension and tension-control in the newborn was discussed.

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