Psychology 101
Personality and relationships
Attachment Styles Explained: The 4 Styles in Relationships
The CQ Team · 8 min read ·
The four attachment styles, secure, anxious, dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant, where they come from in Bowlby and Ainsworth's research, how they are measured, and whether yours can change.
Attachment styles describe how people handle closeness and dependence in their relationships. The adult version has four styles: secure, anxious (also called preoccupied), dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant. They come from two research traditions. One is John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's work on infants and parents. The other is the work since the 1980s on adult romantic love.
John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, argued that children are built to form a bond with a caregiver, and that the quality of that bond shapes later life. In 1951 he wrote a report for the World Health Organization, Maternal Care and Mental Health. It was written in six months and translated into 14 languages (Bretherton, 1992). He set out the full theory in three books: Attachment (1969), Separation (1973) and Loss (1980).
Mary Ainsworth joined Bowlby's research unit at the Tavistock Clinic in London in 1950. She later built the Strange Situation, a short laboratory procedure in which a one-year-old is briefly separated from a parent and then reunited. How the baby behaves at the reunion is the key to the classification. Her best-known study followed 26 families in Baltimore, recruited before the babies were born and visited at home 18 times over the first year.
Ainsworth described three patterns. Mary Main and Judith Solomon later added a fourth.
| Pattern | What the baby does at reunion |
|---|---|
| Secure (B) | Seeks the parent, is comforted, goes back to playing |
| Avoidant (A) | Ignores or turns away from the parent |
| Resistant or ambivalent (C) | Seeks contact but stays upset and angry |
| Disorganized (D) | Shows confused or contradictory behaviour with no clear strategy |
A 2023 meta-analysis of 285 studies and 20,720 parent and child pairs found 51.6% of infants classed as secure, 14.7% avoidant, 10.2% resistant and 23.5% disorganized (Madigan et al., 2023).
In 1985, psychologists Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver printed a "love quiz" in the Rocky Mountain News. They asked readers which of three short paragraphs best described their feelings in romantic relationships. Of 574 people who answered, 56% chose the secure description, 25% the avoidant one and 19% the anxious-ambivalent one. A second study of 108 students gave almost the same split (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). The authors note the newspaper sample was self-selected.
The secure paragraph began: "I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me."
In 1991, Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz split the avoidant style in two. Their model crosses two questions: is your view of yourself positive or negative, and is your view of other people positive or negative (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991).
| Positive view of others | Negative view of others | |
|---|---|---|
| Positive view of self | Secure | Dismissive-avoidant |
| Negative view of self | Anxious (preoccupied) | Fearful-avoidant |
Comfortable with both closeness and independence. Secure adults can depend on a partner and be depended on without much worry about being abandoned or smothered.
Wants a lot of closeness and worries about losing it. Bartholomew and Horowitz call it preoccupied: a low view of the self paired with a high view of others. In Hazan and Shaver's words, the anxious person often worries "that my partner doesn't really love me".
Values independence and keeps others at a distance. The person thinks well of themselves but expects little from others. Bartholomew and Horowitz describe the style as dismissing of intimacy.
Wants closeness but fears it. The person doubts both themselves and others, so they avoid intimacy to avoid being hurt. The authors say the two avoidant styles share "the avoidance of intimacy" and differ in how much the person needs others' acceptance.
Many websites call this fourth adult style "disorganized attachment". In the research, disorganized is the infant category from the Strange Situation. The two come from different classification systems, and the studies we read do not treat them as the same thing.
Most researchers no longer sort adults into boxes. They measure two scales, attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, and place each person on both. A secure adult is low on both. Psychologist R. Chris Fraley writes that "attachment styles are things that vary in degree rather than kind" (Fraley, adult attachment overview). A 2015 study found that "none of the analyses provided evidence for a categorical model" (Fraley et al., 2015).
The four styles are still a useful shorthand. Just read them as corners of a map, with most people somewhere in between.
The standard research questionnaire is the Experiences in Close Relationships scale (ECR) and its revision, the ECR-R. Each has 36 statements, 18 for anxiety and 18 for avoidance. The ECR-R is rated on a 7-point scale (ECR-R). Bartholomew and Horowitz's Relationship Questionnaire is a shorter option: you rate four paragraphs, one per style, for how well each describes you.
Yes, though usually not by much. Fraley reports that attachment to parents is only moderately stable over time, with correlations of about .25 to .39 (Fraley). A study that followed more than 4,000 adults found that half of the life events studied went with an immediate change in attachment. On average people drifted back afterwards, but they changed in lasting ways after about a quarter of the events (Fraley, Gillath & Deboeck, 2021). Researchers also study "earned security". A 23-year study in Minnesota followed people from infancy. Those who were insecure as babies but secure as adults went on to do well in their close relationships (Roisman et al., 2002).
Cerebral Quotient does not have an attachment style test, and attachment is not one of the Big Five traits. If you want to see your broad traits, our Big Five test is a short test in the style of the Big Five model, not an official instrument. For how personality plays out between partners, read MBTI compatibility or browse the personality and relationships hub.
Secure, anxious (or preoccupied), dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant. The four-style model comes from Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991), who crossed a positive or negative view of yourself with a positive or negative view of others.
Secure. In Hazan and Shaver's 1987 studies, 56% of adults chose the secure description, and a 2023 meta-analysis of infant studies found 51.6% of babies classed as secure.
The research tool is a questionnaire such as the ECR-R, which scores you on two scales, anxiety and avoidance. Low on both is secure, high anxiety alone is anxious, high avoidance alone is dismissive, and high on both is fearful-avoidant.
Yes. Researchers measure anxiety and avoidance as two separate scales, and someone high on both falls in the fearful-avoidant corner of the model.
It can, usually modestly. A study of more than 4,000 adults found that attachment often shifted after life events, mostly drifted back, but changed in lasting ways after about a quarter of them.
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