Attachment Style
Secure, anxious, avoidant or fearful?
Free, no account needed.
Attachment style describes how you tend to feel and act in close relationships: how much you worry about being loved and valued, and how comfortable you are depending on others and letting them depend on you. This test measures both and places you on the classic map of four adult styles.
Think of your close relationships in general: partners, close friends and family. If one relationship stands out, answer for the pattern you see most often. Answer honestly rather than ideally. There is no wrong style, and styles can change.
What it measures
Attachment anxiety
Settled ↔ Worried
How much you worry about being rejected, left or loved less than you love, and how strongly you react to signs of distance.
Settled: You feel settled in your close relationships: silence or time apart rarely makes you doubt where you stand.
Worried: Your alarm for distance is sensitive: you notice small signs of change and need reassurance to feel safe.
Attachment avoidance
Close ↔ Distant
How uncomfortable you are with emotional closeness, with depending on others and with being depended on.
Close: Closeness feels natural: you open up, lean on people you trust and let them lean on you.
Distant: You prize self-reliance and keep some emotional distance; too much closeness can feel like pressure.
Possible results
About this test
Attachment theory began with the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who argued that infants are born with a drive to stay close to someone who can protect and soothe them. Mary Ainsworth's "Strange Situation" studies of the late 1960s and 1970s showed that babies differ in how they use that caregiver: as a secure base, with anxious clinging, or with apparent indifference. In 1987 Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver proposed that adult romantic love runs on the same system, and around 1990 Kim Bartholomew, with Leonard Horowitz, crossed a person's view of self with their view of others to describe four adult styles: secure, preoccupied, dismissing and fearful.
Later work by Kelly Brennan, R. Chris Fraley, Phillip Shaver and colleagues showed that adult attachment is best measured on two continuous dimensions: anxiety (worry about rejection and abandonment) and avoidance (discomfort with closeness and dependence). Fraley's research also suggests that people differ by degree rather than falling into neat boxes, and that attachment is moderately stable but can change, especially through new relationships.
This test uses original items about close relationships in general and scores both dimensions from 0 to 100. Your style is the quadrant you fall in, split at the midpoint; the ranking shows how close you are to each prototype. Scores are relative to the answer range, not to population norms, and your style may differ from one relationship to another.
This is a self-reflection tool, not a clinical instrument. It cannot diagnose anything, and one result says nothing fixed about who you are. Many people move toward "earned security" over the years.
References
- Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment.
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E. & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation.
- Hazan, C. & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 511-524.
- Bartholomew, K. & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 226-244.
- Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L. & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self-report measurement of adult attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment Theory and Close Relationships.
- Fraley, R. C. & Roisman, G. I. (2019). The development of adult attachment styles: Four lessons. Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 26-30.
- Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change (2nd ed.).
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
Attachment Style
About 5 minutes · 34 questions
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