Attachment Style Test
16-question attachment style test: your anxiety and avoidance dimension scores plus your style — Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant or Fearful-Avoidant.
Attachment Style Test
Sixteen statements, about two minutes. Think about how you generally experience close relationships — partners, closest friends, family — and rate how much each statement sounds like you. You'll get your two attachment dimension scores (anxiety and avoidance) and the style they map to: Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant, or Fearful-Avoidant.
Attachment research's most hopeful finding: styles are patterns, not sentences — "earned security" through steady relationships and deliberate work is well documented in the literature.
How the Attachment Style Test Works
Answer for your general pattern
Rate each statement for how you usually experience close relationships — not your current relationship on its worst week. Attachment patterns are tendencies across relationships and time; one difficult situation doesn't define yours.
Rate 16 statements
Eight measure attachment anxiety (how much you worry about availability and abandonment), eight measure avoidance (how comfortable closeness and depending on people feel) — half keyed each way so agreeing with everything can't skew you. Resume works for 24 hours if you close the tab; answers stay on your device.
Read the dimensions first, then the style
Your real result is two scores from 8 to 40. The style label — Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant, Fearful-Avoidant — is just which quadrant those scores land in, and we flag when you're near a border, because a label that flips on retake shouldn't be the headline.
Read your style page for the working version
Each style links to a full profile: what the pattern looks like day to day, where it likely came from, how it behaves in relationships, and what the research actually says about change — which is the genuinely hopeful part.
About Attachment Styles — the Science, Honestly Told
Where the Framework Comes From
Attachment theory is one of psychology's genuinely load-bearing frameworks. It began with John Bowlby's work on infant bonding and Mary Ainsworth's famous observation studies, and was extended to adult relationships in the 1980s, when researchers showed that the way adults relate to partners and close friends follows recognisable patterns with measurable consequences. Modern adult-attachment research settled on two underlying dimensions rather than hard categories: attachment anxiety — how much you monitor and worry about the availability of the people you love — and attachment avoidance — how comfortable you are with closeness and with depending on others. The four familiar styles are simply the quadrants of that two-dimensional space, and the fourth quadrant's proper adult name is fearful-avoidant (high on both dimensions) — you'll sometimes see it mislabelled "disorganised" online, which is actually an infant-attachment classification borrowed past its jurisdiction.
The statements you'll rate are an original RECATOOLS item set written for this site: eight per dimension, balanced keying, openly published scoring. We wrote our own because the established research questionnaires carry research-use permissions rather than commercial web rights — and we'd rather build transparently than borrow ambiguously. That honesty cuts both ways: the two-dimension framework is among the best-validated in relationship science, but our specific items have no validation studies, so treat your scores as structured self-reflection, not measurement.
"The dimensions are the finding; the styles are just the map's four quadrants. And the most replicated good news in the field is that the map isn't destiny — security can be earned."
What the Research Actually Supports
Three findings worth carrying with you. First, attachment patterns predict real relationship outcomes — conflict styles, jealousy, support-seeking, breakup behaviour — at meaningful but modest strength; they're a current, not a cage. Second, patterns are relationship-specific as well as general: many people run secure with a best friend and anxious with a partner, which is why our prompt asks about your general pattern and why a single score can't capture everything. Third — the hopeful one — longitudinal research documents earned security: people move toward the secure quadrant through stable relationships, self-understanding, and sometimes therapy. Insecure attachment is among the most changeable of the patterns this site's tests measure. One boundary to keep: this page is self-reflection, not assessment of trauma or a substitute for professional support — if close relationships are a source of ongoing distress, a licensed therapist (many work specifically with attachment) is the genuinely evidence-based next step, and our Big Five test is the better tool if what you want is broad personality measurement.
The Four Styles
Secure
Comfortable with closeness and with independence — the base camp the other styles work toward.
Anxious-Preoccupied
Closeness feels vital and fragile at once — the alarm watches for distance and rings early.
Dismissive-Avoidant
Self-reliance feels safest — closeness is rationed, and needing people sits uncomfortably.
Fearful-Avoidant
Wanting closeness and bracing against it at the same time — the push-pull pattern.
Frequently Asked Questions
- They're the four quadrants of two research dimensions. Secure (low anxiety, low avoidance): comfortable with closeness and independence. Anxious-Preoccupied (high anxiety, low avoidance): craves closeness, worries about losing it. Dismissive-Avoidant (low anxiety, high avoidance): self-reliant, rations closeness. Fearful-Avoidant (high on both): wants closeness and braces against it. The dimensions are the science; the labels are reading aids.
- They get conflated online, but no: "disorganised" is a classification from infant attachment research (Main and Solomon's work observing babies), while the adult quadrant for high-anxiety-plus-high-avoidance is properly called fearful-avoidant, from Bartholomew's adult model. We use the adult term because this is an adult self-reflection test — one of several places where we'd rather be precise than copy the internet.
- Yes — and this is the field's best-replicated good news. Longitudinal studies document "earned security": people move toward the secure quadrant through stable, responsive relationships, through self-understanding, and through therapy. Styles also shift with major relationship events in both directions. Treat your result as a current reading of a changeable pattern, not a diagnosis of a fixed trait.
- Because that's how attachment actually works: research finds patterns are partly relationship-specific. Many people are secure with a best friend, anxious with a romantic partner, and avoidant with a parent — each bond has its own history. This test asks about your general pattern across close relationships; if one specific relationship feels very different, that difference is itself useful information.
- The framework began with caregiving research, and early experiences matter — but adult attachment reflects your whole relationship history: later family life, friendships, partners, and what you've practised. Blame is also just less useful than the field's actual finding: patterns formed in relationships change in relationships. Where the past involves real harm, that's territory for a professional, not a web test.
- No pairing is doomed and none is guaranteed. Research does find some pairings run harder loops — the anxious-avoidant pursue-withdraw cycle is the famous one — but the strongest predictor isn't matching styles, it's whether both people can see the pattern and respond to each other's needs anyway. Two partners who know their styles have names for their loops, and named loops are escapable.
- Because the two dimension scores ARE the result — modern attachment research measures anxiety and avoidance as continuous dimensions, and the four styles are just the quadrants. Someone scoring 26 on avoidance and someone scoring 39 get the same label and live quite different patterns. We show the scores, flag border-zone results, and treat the label as the summary it is.
- Your answers are scored entirely in your browser and are never uploaded or stored by RECATOOLS. While a test is in progress they're kept in your browser's local storage so you can resume if the tab closes, and they're deleted from it when you finish. Viewing pages on this site works like any other website and is covered by our Privacy Policy.
- No. This is a self-reflection tool built on a well-studied framework, with an original, unvalidated item set — useful for vocabulary and self-understanding, and no substitute for professional assessment. If close relationships are a source of ongoing distress, or your history includes experiences that still weigh on you, a licensed therapist is the evidence-based next step; many specialise in exactly this territory.
- RECATOOLS wrote them — sixteen original statements measuring the two research dimensions, with the scoring rule published openly on this page and an authorship attestation in the tool's provenance record confirming no existing attachment questionnaire's items were consulted. The established research instruments carry research-use permissions, so rather than borrow ambiguously, we built transparently.
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