A non-separation diagnostic framework for assessing canine attachment structure
Jongkyu Kim
Conventional diagnostic approaches to canine attachment and separation-related behaviors rely primarily on behavioral outcomes observed during induced separation from the caregiver. While widely adopted, separation-based assessments may conflate superficially similar behaviors that arise from fundamentally different caregiver–dog relational structures (e.g., secure regulation vs. avoidant disengagement vs. ambivalent hyper-proximity), thereby raising ethical, conceptual, and interpretive limitat