The phrase "attachment behaviour was" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing the concept of attachment behavior in psychology or related fields, often in the context of describing a past state or observation.
Example: "The study revealed that attachment behaviour was significantly influenced by early childhood experiences."
Alternatives: "attachment behavior existed" or "attachment behavior occurred".
However, he considered that attachment behaviour was best explained as instinctive, combined with the effect of experience, stressing the readiness the child brings to social interactions.
It might for example be of help for parents to reflect upon how their own avoidant attachment behaviour was quite an appropriate strategy when they were children, but that the situation is now different, with new possibilities both in relation to their partners and in their ways of meeting their own children's needs of a secure base.
Attachment behaviour is supposed to influence psychological and physical well-being, coping, illness behaviour and social functioning [2].
If the caregiver is inaccessible or unresponsive, attachment behaviour is more strongly exhibited.
Bowlby suggests that attachment behaviour is activated under a threat and individuals then engage in support-seeking behaviour.
Attachment theory predicts and subsequent empirical research has amply demonstrated that individual variations in patterns of early attachment behaviour are primarily influenced by differences in sensitive responsiveness of caregivers.
This is analogous to reading about love in a novel and reading about love in a treatise on "attachment behaviours", with the difference that romantic ideas of love are the norm for people, and scientific theories of attachment behaviours are considered evidence of an unsavoury degree of coldheartedness on the part of scientists.
In the 1970s, problems with viewing attachment as a trait (stable characteristic of an individual) rather than as a type of behaviour with organising functions and outcomes, led some authors to the conclusion that attachment behaviours were best understood in terms of their functions in the child's life.
However, due to their less specific species recognition system and unique attachment behaviour, dogs are at an advantage to include humans in their social environment, and even intensively socialized wolves do not regard their caretakers as attachment figures [15].
Attachment behaviour has been described as proximity-, comfort- and security seeking when confronted with some kind of stress (Bowlby in 49).
A similar protective effect of the homozygous 'long/long' (l/l) genotype or else a buffering effect of maternal behaviour was found in human studies of infant attachment.
