ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of select assessments and observation tools that include nonverbal measures to evaluate the young child’s somatic and psychic distress. It ends with an assessment tool Tortora created, Dyadic Attachment-based Nonverbal Communicative Expressions (DANCE), derived from these assessments and Tortora’s nonverbal analysis training. This chapter also highlights the specific nonverbal qualities she focuses on to understand the dynamics of the parent-child relationship in the treatment setting. The opening vignette in this chapter demonstrates how a parent appropriately reads her baby’s cues of distress but has a limited repertoire of methods to soothe her distraught child with cancer. It exemplifies how Tortora uses the information she gleaned from DANCE to help the parent pay attention to her baby’s nonverbal cues, building the parent’s confidence in her parenting, which strengthens the parent-child relationship. Appendix A describes this opening vignette using the DANCE tool in detail.
