Attachment Style Test

By Murat Şahin · Updated November 12, 2026 · How we test

How the attachment style test works

Press Start the attachment test and you see one statement at a time, such as "I need frequent signs that the people close to me still care." Think of your close relationships in general, a partner or the people you feel closest to, and pick how well each statement describes you, from Disagree to Agree. Keys 1 to 5 work too, and Back lets you change an answer. There are 20 statements and most people need about three minutes.

Ten statements measure attachment anxiety: how much you worry about rejection, read meaning into small signals and need reassurance. The other ten measure attachment avoidance: how uneasy you feel with closeness and depending on others. Some statements point the other way ("I feel secure in my relationships even when things go quiet for a while") and are reversed before scoring, so agreeing with everything does not push both scores up. Attachment is only one side of personality; for the broad picture, the Big Five personality test measures five general traits.

Two dimensions, four styles

The idea behind the test comes from research on adult attachment. Kelly Brennan, Catherine Clark and Phillip Shaver (1998) analysed almost all the self-report attachment measures in use and found that they boil down to two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance. Your result card places you on a map with avoidance across and anxiety up, and the four corners carry the names Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz (1991) gave to the four combinations:

• Secure (low anxiety, low avoidance): closeness feels safe and you do not expect to be let down.
• Anxious (high anxiety, low avoidance): you want closeness and worry about losing it. Bartholomew called this preoccupied.
• Avoidant (low anxiety, high avoidance): you are comfortable on your own and keep some distance. Bartholomew called this dismissing.
• Fearful-avoidant (both high): you may want closeness and fear it at the same time.

How to read your score

Each dimension is turned into a score from 0 to 100: the ten answers give a raw total between 10 and 50, and we convert it with (raw − 10) ÷ 40 × 100. The map splits at 50, the middle of the scale. That split is our own convention for drawing the map, not a clinical cut-off, and a score is not a percentile: 60 does not mean you are more anxious than 60% of people. If one of your scores is within 10 points of the middle, the card tells you so, because the neighbouring region then fits you almost as well.

The two meters are often more useful than the label. Brennan and colleagues, and later Fraley, Waller and Brennan (2000), stressed that attachment varies continuously: people are not neatly one type or another. If you take the test again, the card shows your previous result as a dashed circle on the map so you can see how much it moves.

Where attachment theory comes from

John Bowlby (1969) proposed that infants are born with an attachment system that keeps them close to a caregiver who can protect them. Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues (1978) observed one-year-olds in the "Strange Situation", a short separation and reunion with the parent, and described secure, anxious-ambivalent and avoidant patterns. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987) then showed that adults describe their romantic relationships in strikingly similar terms, which opened decades of research on adult attachment.

What you can do with your result

Attachment styles are fairly stable, but they are not fixed. Bowlby described them as "working models" of relationships, built from experience and open to change through new experiences, and people often report somewhat different patterns with different people. Some practical uses:

• Anxious side: notice when you are reading a lot into a late reply, and ask directly instead of guessing.
• Avoidant side: tell people what you need, including space, so distance is not read as coldness.
• Fearful-avoidant: the push-pull pattern is the one most often worth talking through with a counsellor.

Emotional skills play a part in all of this; the emotional intelligence test looks at how you notice and handle feelings, your own and other people's. If you want to see which everyday gestures make you feel loved, try the love language test.

Limits of this test

The 20 statements were written for this site and are not the Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) or ECR-R items. They follow the same two-dimension idea, but they are original and unnormed: there is no comparison group and no published validation. Your answers also depend on your current relationship and mood. This is a self-reflection tool, not a psychological assessment or a diagnosis. If relationship patterns are causing you real distress, a psychologist or couples therapist can help.

More tests like this: personality tests.

Sources

• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 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(2), 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 (pp. 46–76). Guilford Press.
• 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, 78(2), 350–365.

Frequently asked questions