Attachment Style tests

The attachment theory, developed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby from his clinical work with children after World War II and later expanded by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, explains how the bonds we form in childhood shape the way we relate to others as adults: how much closeness we seek, how we handle the fear of being left, and how comfortable we feel depending on another person. Bowlby argued something that was controversial at the time: that this bond is a primary need in its own right, as biological as hunger, not a simple side effect of being fed.

Two axes, four styles

The model describes attachment along two independent axes: anxiety (how much you worry about being unloved or abandoned) and avoidance (how much discomfort closeness and emotional dependence bring up in you).

Combining both axes produces four styles:

• Secure: low anxiety, low avoidance.
• Anxious: high anxiety, low avoidance.
• Avoidant: high avoidance, low anxiety.
• Disorganized: both high.

How it's measured: from the "Strange Situation" to the Adult Attachment Interview

The way attachment is measured has evolved alongside the model itself. In 1978, Ainsworth designed the "Strange Situation": an experiment with just eight brief episodes (a mother and child in a room full of toys, the appearance of a stranger, two short separations, and their reunions) that let researchers classify one-year-olds by how they reacted to seeing their mother again.

For adults, Canadian psychologist Kim Bartholomew proposed, together with Leonard Horowitz in 1991, a model far easier to apply outside a lab: cross two questions, do I deserve love and attention? (model of self) and can I trust that others will be there for me? (model of others). The same four styles emerge from combining positive and negative answers to those two questions. That's exactly the logic our test follows: it places your result on a two-axis map, not in a contest between four closed labels.

The clinical gold standard remains the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, Main, Kaplan, and George, 1985), which a trained professional scores less on what you say about your childhood than on how coherently you say it. Self-report questionnaires like ours are much simpler, but line up reasonably well with its results.

Attachment isn't a life sentence: earned security

No style is fixed or final: research on so-called "earned security" shows that attachment patterns can shift with self-awareness, relationships that offer a secure base and, when needed, therapy. Our test is a popular-science, informational take inspired by this model. It doesn't replace a professional psychological assessment or the Adult Attachment Interview.

Psychologists Phillip Shaver and Mario Mikulincer, authors of the reference book on adult attachment Attachment in Adulthood, describe anxiety and avoidance as two secondary strategies for regulating emotion when an attachment figure isn't always available: hyperactivation (keeping the attachment system constantly on alert, pushing until attention is secured) and deactivation (what Bowlby called "compulsive self-reliance": suppressing the search for closeness and managing distress alone).

The most widely used self-report instrument in research for measuring both is the 36-item ECR scale (Brennan, Clark, and Shaver, 1998), the direct precursor to the questionnaire our test is based on. Recent research mostly relies on its revised version, the ECR-R (Fraley, Waller, and Brennan, 2000), which sharpens the psychometrics of those same two axes.

The biological signature: it's not just a questionnaire

The evidence isn't limited to self-report: an fMRI study by Coan, Schaefer, and Davidson (2006) found that holding a partner's hand under the threat of an electric shock reduced the brain's stress response, and other work on physical touch in couples, such as Grewen et al. (2003), recorded lower blood pressure during interaction with a partner than alone: the biological signature of what the theory calls a "secure base."

Sources

• Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss, Vol. I: Attachment.
• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment.
• Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1986). Discovery of a new, insecure disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern.
• Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: a test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Shaver, P. R., & Mikulincer, M. (2009). Attachment theory: I and II. In Corr, P. J. & Matthews, G. (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology.
• Fraley, R. C., Waller, N. G., & Brennan, K. A. (2000). An item response theory analysis of self-report measures of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science.
• Grewen, K. M., Girdler, S. S., Amico, J., & Light, K. C. (2003). Effects of partner support on resting oxytocin, cortisol, norepinephrine, and blood pressure before and after warm partner contact. Psychosomatic Medicine.