Attachment Style Test: Secure, Anxious, Avoidant or Fearful?

What an attachment style test measures

Attachment theory started with John Bowlby’s work on how infants stay close to caregivers, and with Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” studies in the 1970s, which sorted toddlers by how they reacted when a parent left the room and came back. In 1987 Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver showed that adults describe their romantic relationships in similar terms.

Adult self-report research settled on two dimensions:

• Attachment anxiety: how much you worry about being rejected or abandoned, and how much reassurance you need.
• Attachment avoidance: how uncomfortable you are with emotional closeness and depending on other people, or having them depend on you.

Crossing the two gives the four styles that Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz described in 1991.

Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver describe the anxious pattern as hyperactivating the attachment system (turning up the signal to get a response) and the avoidant pattern as deactivating it (turning the signal down to stay self-sufficient).

Where the ECR-R comes from

Early adult measures asked people to pick one paragraph that described them. In 1998 Kelly Brennan, Catherine Clark and Phillip Shaver pooled items from dozens of existing attachment questionnaires, factor-analyzed them, and found the two dimensions above. The result was the 36-item Experiences in Close Relationships scale (ECR). In 2000, R. Chris Fraley, Niels Waller and Brennan used item response theory to choose more precise items, producing the ECR-R: 18 anxiety items and 18 avoidance items rated on a 7-point scale.

Fraley and Waller (1998) also tested whether attachment really comes in distinct types and found it behaves like two continuous dimensions. The four styles are a convenient summary. Your two scores are the more precise result.

How this test scores you

The attachment items sit inside Depth Profile’s Relationship DNA assessment, which also covers love languages, conflict style and intimacy. It takes about 6 minutes. Right now everyone completes the free Personality Core (the Big Five test) first, because the report reads attachment against your Big Five traits.

1. You rate ECR-R-style statements, such as “I worry about being abandoned by the people I love,” from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.
2. A short conflict scenario (what you do after an argument) adds signal to the anxiety or avoidance side, depending on your choice.
3. Each dimension is averaged and rescaled to 0 to 100.
4. Your style is the quadrant your two scores fall in, using 50 as the dividing line on each.

How attachment shows up in relationships

The pattern that brings most couples to a therapist is the anxious-avoidant loop. One partner feels distance and pursues: more messages, more questions, raising the issue again. The other feels pressure and withdraws: shorter answers, more time alone, changing the subject. Each partner’s move triggers the other’s. Andrew Christensen and colleagues documented this as the demand-withdraw pattern, and Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy is built around interrupting it.

Attachment also predicts how satisfied people are. Tianyuan Li and Darius Chan’s 2012 meta-analysis found both anxiety and avoidance linked to lower relationship quality, in somewhat different ways. Erika Noftle and Phillip Shaver (2006) found that attachment scores predicted relationship quality even after accounting for the Big Five, so the two measures are not redundant.

Some specific things each pattern tends to produce:

• Anxious: reading a late reply as a sign of lost interest, agreeing to things to avoid conflict and resenting it later, needing to resolve an argument tonight.
• Avoidant: feeling crowded when a partner wants to talk about the relationship, going quiet during conflict, treating a partner’s need as a demand.
• Fearful-avoidant: pushing for closeness, then feeling trapped once it arrives, or testing a partner to see whether they will stay.
• Secure: still fights, but repairs faster, and can hear a complaint without treating it as a verdict on the relationship.

If you are in a relationship, the scores are most useful side by side. The couples guide covers how to compare results without turning them into ammunition.

How attachment shows up at work

Hazan and Shaver followed their 1987 study with a 1990 paper titled “Love and work.” Secure respondents reported the most satisfaction at work and the least fear of failure. Anxious respondents worried more about how others judged their performance and more often felt under-appreciated. Avoidant respondents were more likely to use work to keep distance from relationships and to prefer working alone.

In practice that can look like an anxious employee rereading a manager’s one-line email for hidden criticism, or an avoidant manager who handles conflict by moving it to written channels. Neither is a performance problem in itself. Knowing your pattern helps you ask for the kind of feedback you can use.

Can your attachment style change?

Yes, within limits. R. Chris Fraley’s 2002 meta-analysis found attachment security moderately stable from infancy into adulthood, which means early experience matters but leaves plenty of room for change. Researchers use the term earned security for adults who describe difficult early relationships yet score secure now, usually after a stable relationship, therapy, or both.

Attachment is also partly relationship-specific. Fraley and colleagues’ ECR-RS (2011) measures it separately for a mother, father, partner and best friend, and many people score secure with one and anxious with another. Your result here reflects close relationships in general, weighted toward romantic ones.

How attachment fits with your Big Five scores

Attachment anxiety overlaps with Neuroticism; Noftle and Shaver found a substantial correlation between them. Avoidance relates more weakly to low Agreeableness and low Extraversion. The overlap explains why reading the two together is useful: anxious attachment with high Neuroticism usually feels like constant background worry, while anxious attachment with low Neuroticism tends to switch on only in romantic relationships.

The free result shows your two scores and your style. The $19 report adds a written relationship section built from your attachment scores, your Big Five, your love-language ranking and your conflict answers: what you need to feel secure and what you read as a threat, the six-step sequence your arguments tend to follow, the blind spot partners see more clearly than you do, and five specific lines a partner could say mid-conflict that help you stay in the conversation.

Wondering why the same fight keeps happening? The free Why You’re Stuck exercise works on one specific situation. For careers, see the RIASEC career test; for using attachment results with clients, see the guide for coaches.