Attachment styles are expectations people develop about relationships with others, and the first attachment is based on the relationship individuals had with their primary caregiver when they were infants.
Attachment Style Quiz
Discover your attachment style based on the ECR-RS, a validated measure of attachment anxiety and avoidance in close relationships.
This short 9-item questionnaire assesses two core dimensions of adult attachment: anxiety (the degree to which you worry about rejection and abandonment) and avoidance (the degree to which you are uncomfortable with closeness and dependence on others).
Your scores on these two dimensions determine which of four attachment styles best describes your pattern of relating to others: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, or fearful-avoidant.
Based on: Fraley, R. C., Heffernan, M. E., Vicary, A. M., & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2011). The Experiences in Close Relationships—Relationship Structures questionnaire. Psychological Assessment, 23(3), 615–625.
Help us personalise your results
All fields are optional. Your answers are anonymous and used for research purposes only.
Choose how accurately each statement reflects you.
Question 1 of 5
It helps to turn to people close to me in times of need.
I usually discuss my problems and concerns with close others.
I talk things over with people close to me.
I find it easy to depend on people close to me.
I don\\\\\\\'t feel comfortable opening up to others.
All questions must be answered before you continue.
Choose how accurately each statement reflects you.
Question 1 of 4
I prefer not to show others how I feel deep down.
I often worry that close others don\\\\\\\'t really care for me.
I\\\\\\\'m afraid that close others may abandon me.
I worry that close others won\\\\\\\'t care about me as much as I care about them.
All questions must be answered before you continue.
Calculating your results…
What is my attachment style?
The following statements explore how you typically feel in emotionally intimate relationships, both past and present.
This does not necessarily need to be a romantic relationship, but should be an individual with whom you feel (or have felt) the most connection.
For example, it might be a friend, a work colleague, or your primary “go-to” person. Think of whoever you turn to in trouble. It is also the person you call with good news.
Respond to each statement by selecting a number to indicate how much you agree or disagree with the statement.
Rate each statement on a scale of 1 to 5:
1 = Strongly Disagree
2 = Disagree
3 = Neutral
4 = Agree
5 = Strongly Agree
NOTE: This attachment style quiz is meant as an educational tool, but is not meant as an official diagnosis or clinical assessment.
Secure attachment
- I feel comfortable expressing my emotions and thoughts to others
- I am comfortable depending on others for help when necessary
- I can maintain a healthy balance between intimacy and independence in relationships
- I feel comfortable being vulnerable with my partner
- I respect my partner’s needs and boundaries and am comfortable setting my own
People with secure attachments generally have positive views of themselves and others. They're comfortable with intimacy and independence, can communicate emotions effectively, and have stable, satisfying relationships.
Anxious attachment
- I worry whether people like me or not
- I rely heavily on my partner’s approval and validation to feel good about myself
- I often use physical closeness (like hugging) to reduce my anxiety in relationships
- I often feel that I’m not good enough to be in my relationship and question why my partner would want to be with me
- I become highly emotionally reactive when my partner is not available
Anxious attachment style is characterized by a strong desire for closeness, fear of abandonment, and heightened emotional responses in relationships.
Individuals with this style often seek constant reassurance and may become overly dependent on their partners.
If you tend to feel insecure, worry about rejection, or are clingy with romantic partners, you may have an anxious attachment style.
Avoidant attachment
- I feel uncomfortable when others try to get emotionally close to me
- I prioritize self-reliance over seeking emotional support from others
- I find it difficult to trust others completely
- I value my independence more than close relationships
- I tend to downplay or suppress my emotions
Avoidant attachment is a pattern of keeping emotional distance. People with this style play down how much intimate relationships matter to them, often as self-protection.
Avoidant individuals tend to have a negative view of others and a mostly positive view of themselves. They believe other people are untrustworthy and dishonest, whereas they are confident and capable and do not need the support of anyone else.
Fearful-avoidant attachment
- You have conflicting desires for closeness and distance
- Your behavior in relationships may be unpredictable
- You may have trouble regulating emotions
- I need control and security in my relationships, but I don’t know how to achieve this
- I generally have a negative view of myself and others
- My relationships tend to have many extreme highs and lows.
- The person I want to go to for safety is often the same person I’m frightened to be close to
- I tend to create drama in my relationships without intending to
Fearful-avoidant attachment is often rooted in childhood trauma or inconsistent caregiving. People with this attachment style typically want close relationships but fear being hurt or rejected.
This leads to push-pull behaviors and emotional turbulence in relationships.
If you identify with these traits, working with a therapist specializing in attachment issues can be helpful in developing more secure attachment patterns and healthier relationships.
Scoring
For each attachment style, sum your scores for the corresponding 5 questions:
- Secure attachment: Sum of questions 1-5
- Anxious attachment: Sum of questions 6-10
- Avoidant attachment: Sum of questions 11-15
- Fearful-avoidant attachment: Sum of questions 16-23
The attachment style with the highest score is likely your predominant style. However, it’s common to have traits from multiple styles.
The fearful-avoidant set has more statements than the other three. Compare your average rating per statement rather than the raw totals.
How Accurate Is an Attachment Style Quiz?
A quiz like this one is a self-report measure. It asks what you consciously believe about closeness, trust, and reassurance, then sorts those answers into a style.
That is genuinely useful. It is also limited in ways worth knowing before you read too much into a single result.
What the Quiz Actually Measures
Underneath the four style labels sit two separate dimensions. Attachment anxiety is how much you fear rejection and need reassurance from a partner. Attachment avoidance is how uncomfortable you feel with closeness and with depending on someone.
Crossing those two dimensions produces the four styles. Secure sits low on both. Anxious is high on anxiety alone, avoidant high on avoidance alone, and fearful-avoidant high on both.
Researchers measure the same two dimensions with the Experiences in Close Relationships questionnaire (Brennan et al., 1998). Its revision, the ECR-RS, scores attachment separately for parents, friends, and romantic partners instead of assuming one global style (Fraley et al., 2011).
The 20 statements above draw on the same tradition. They are grounded in the item-response-theory analysis of adult attachment measures by Fraley et al. (2000).
Why Four Boxes Simplify a Sliding Scale
The four styles are a shorthand, not four natural kinds. Statistical methods built to detect real categories in data, known as taxometric analyses, have searched for a genuine boundary between attachment types.
They did not find one. Fraley and Waller (1998) ran that test on a large sample of young adults and found the data fitted continuous dimensions far better than discrete types.
Fraley et al. (2015) repeated it across both general and relationship-specific measures, with more data and a wider range of questionnaires, and reached the same conclusion.
This matters for reading your own result. A single “predominant style” throws away how strongly you scored, and two people who are statistically very similar can land in different boxes.
The four categories still mark four corners of that same two-dimensional space, so the labels are not meaningless. Read all four totals, not only the highest.
Getting a More Accurate Assessment
Treat your result as a prompt, not a verdict. Three things will tell you more:
- Validated questionnaire: Take a validated attachment style questionnaire, which scores both dimensions rather than sorting you into one box.
- Your own patterns: Reflect on how you have actually behaved across several relationships, not only the one on your mind today.
- Professional support: Consult a mental health professional, who can explore the patterns behind your answers with you.
The third one matters most. Psychologists also assess attachment with the Adult Attachment Interview (George et al., 1984). It is scored on how coherently someone can tell the story of their own relationship history.
Compared with self-report questionnaires, that interview correlates only modestly (Roisman et al., 2007). The two are not measuring the same thing.
A questionnaire captures the account you can give of yourself. An interview reaches a working model you may not be able to describe directly. That is why a quiz result is a starting point for reflection rather than a clinical assessment.
How to Use Your Result
- Mixed profiles: Most people don’t fit neatly into one category and carry traits from more than one style.
- Not fixed: Attachment styles can change over time with self-awareness and effort.
- Not a diagnosis: This quiz is a starting point for self-reflection, not a clinical assessment.
- Professional support: A mental health professional can offer a fuller assessment and guidance on relationship patterns.
- Room to grow: Whatever your style, therapy, self-help resources, and conscious effort can build more secure behaviors.
Can Your Attachment Style Change?
Yes, though rarely overnight. The research is often summarised as a 70/30 split: roughly seven people in ten hold the same style over long periods, while close to a third shift.
How stable it looks depends on the window you measure.
Across two decades, security proves fairly durable. Waters et al. (2000) followed people from infancy into early adulthood and found 72% kept the classification they had as infants. Those who changed had usually been through a major negative life event.
Week to week, far more movement shows up. Baldwin and Fehr (1995) found that 30% of adults changed their own attachment rating within a week or a few months.
Anxious-ambivalent people fluctuated most. Fraley et al. (2021) later tracked the same question in a naturalistic longitudinal study, testing whether major life events produce lasting shifts in adult attachment.
What actually changes is your internal working model, the template you carry into relationships. Enough new, disconfirming experience can revise it, and psychologists call that earned security. The pattern is learned, not fixed.
Remember, the goal is not to label yourself, but to understand your patterns and work towards healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
Key Takeaways
- Four Styles: The quiz sorts your answers into secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant patterns.
- Two Dimensions: Those styles come from crossing attachment anxiety with attachment avoidance, and both run on a sliding scale.
- Scoring: Total the statements for each style. The highest total is your likely predominant pattern, though most people score on several.
- Not a Diagnosis: This is a self-reflection tool, not a clinical assessment or a diagnosis.
- Categorical Limits: Taxometric research finds attachment is continuous rather than four natural types, so read all four scores (Fraley et al., 2015).
- Change: Around 70% keep the same style long term, but attachment can shift with new experience and effort.
References
Baldwin, M. W., & Fehr, B. (1995). On the instability of attachment style ratings. Personal Relationships, 2, 247-261.
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., Gillath, O., & Deboeck, P. R. (2021). Do life events lead to enduring changes in adult attachment styles? A naturalistic longitudinal investigation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1567-1606. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000326
Fraley, R. C., Heffernan, M. E., Vicary, A. M., & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2011). The Experiences in Close Relationships—Relationship Structures questionnaire: A method for assessing attachment orientations across relationships. Psychological Assessment, 23(3), 615-625. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022898
Fraley, R. C., Hudson, N. W., Heffernan, M. E., & Segal, N. (2015). Are adult attachment styles categorical or dimensional? A taxometric analysis of general and relationship-specific attachment orientations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(2), 354-368. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000027
Fraley, R. C., & Waller, N. G. (1998). Adult attachment patterns: A test of the typological model. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment theory and close relationships (pp. 77-114). 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. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.350
George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1984). The Adult Attachment Interview [Unpublished manuscript]. University of California, Berkeley.
Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E., & Clarke, A. (2007). The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: An empirical rapprochement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(4), 678-697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.4.678
Waters, E., Merrick, S., Treboux, D., Crowell, J., & Albersheim, L. (2000). Attachment security in infancy and early adulthood: A twenty-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 71(3), 684-689. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00176
