Attachment Style Test

What do attachment anxiety and avoidance measure?

Attachment theory looks at how people form close emotional bonds. In 1987 Hazan and Shaver applied it to romantic love between adults and described three styles. In 1998 Brennan, Clark and Shaver analyzed the self-report questionnaires of the time together and found two underlying dimensions. Most researchers still measure attachment along those two lines.

Attachment anxiety is the worry about being rejected or left. When it runs high, a slow reply to a message quickly turns into the question of what you did wrong, and you look for reassurance. Attachment avoidance is discomfort with closeness and with depending on someone. When it runs high, you’d rather solve problems alone, and you feel hemmed in when someone wants a lot of your time. Any mix of high and low scores shows up.

What are the four areas on the map?

Your position on the two axes puts your answers in one of four areas. The four-field layout goes back to a model Bartholomew and Horowitz published in 1991.

Area	Anxiety	Avoidance	What the answers often describe
Secure	low	low	Closeness feels relaxed, asking for help comes easily
Anxious	high	low	A strong wish for closeness, quick worry when something changes
Avoidant	low	high	Independence matters a lot, too much closeness brings an urge for distance
Fearful-avoidant (often called disorganized)	high	high	Closeness feels wanted and uncomfortable at once

Many quizzes call the fourth area disorganized. This one calls it fearful-avoidant because the name describes what the scores show: high anxiety and high avoidance.

None of these areas means something is wrong with you. Each pattern is a way of dealing with the question of how much you can count on closeness. Each one helps in some situations and gets in the way in others. For your own area, the result lists what often goes well, what can happen in conflicts, what can help you and what helps the person you’re with.

How does the attachment style test work?

The quiz has 24 original statements, 12 for each axis. They don’t come from research questionnaires, but they follow the two-dimensional model from attachment research. Before the first statement, the quiz asks you to think about close relationships, especially romantic ones. If you’re single, you think about how things usually went. The order is shuffled, and four statements per axis run in reverse, like one about finding it easy to ask for support. Agreeing with those counts in the opposite direction.

From your answers on the 1 to 5 scale, the quiz takes an average for each axis and converts it to a score from 0 to 100. A score of 50 or more counts as high. The two scores together set your point on the map, and the heading then reads, for example: Your answers fall in the Avoidant range. If a score lands within 10 points of the middle, the result adds that the neighboring description may fit as well.

The line at 50 is a guide, not a norm. Original statements have no reference data from a sample, and the research doesn’t support hard types anyway. Below the map you get both scores as numbers and as bars, plus the description of your area. You can copy the result as text for your own notes.

How does the couples map work?

After your result, you can copy a link for the person you’re with. It holds only your two scores, for example #p=1.75-25 for 75 on anxiety and 25 on avoidance. It carries no answers and no name, so it won’t tell anyone how you rated the statement about slow replies.

The other person opens the link and takes the quiz without seeing your scores first. After that, their screen shows both points on one map: their own as a filled dot and yours as a ring. They can then send you a second link that brings the comparison back. It holds the scores of both of you, and when you open it you see both points right away, without taking the quiz again.

Short notes come with the comparison and describe patterns your combination can bring. When one of you scores high on anxiety and the other high on avoidance, for example, the note describes a cycle where one person seeks closeness and the other pulls back. These are tendencies. The comparison doesn’t predict how your relationship will go, and neither of you needs an app or an account.

In both links the scores sit after the # sign. Your browser splits off that part of an address, the fragment, before it requests the page, and it doesn’t send the fragment to the server (RFC 3986, section 3.5). The scores never reach kittokit. The page reads them in the browser and then removes them from the address bar. Anyone who has one of the links can still see the scores in it, and the links stay in your chat history like any other message.

What does research say about adult attachment styles?

In 1998 Fraley and Waller used taxometric methods on 639 young adults to test whether adults really fall into separate groups. A later paper by Fraley, Hudson, Heffernan and Segal (2015) reported that, across two samples, individual differences “appear more consistent with a dimensional rather than a categorical model,” for attachment in general and within specific relationships. On the page for one of his research questionnaires, Fraley writes: “I strongly recommend against classifying people on the basis of their continuous scores.” That’s why this quiz shows a point with soft borders.

Fraley, Vicary, Brumbaugh and Roisman (2011) surveyed 203 people daily for 30 days and 388 people weekly for a year. The data fit best with a prototype model, which assumes a stable factor underneath temporary variations in attachment. Your result today can come out a bit differently in a few weeks while the underlying tendency stays much the same.

Attachment also depends on the relationship. Fraley’s overview of attachment research puts the link between security with a parent and security with a partner at roughly .20 to .50, small to moderate. Gery Karantzas, director of the Science of Adult Relationships Laboratory at Deakin University, told ABC News in 2024: “You may be secure in your relationship with your spouse, but more anxious with certain friends, or vice versa.” This quiz asks about romantic relationships, so with family or friends your point could sit somewhere else.

Security can also develop later. A 23-year study by Roisman, Padrón, Sroufe and Egeland (2002) describes adults who could give a coherent account of difficult childhood experiences and who had successful close relationships as young adults. A questionnaire with 24 statements can’t tell whether that kind of change happened for you.

What are the limits of this quiz?

This quiz is a reflection aid, not a diagnosis, and it’s written for adults. Its statements haven’t been tested in a study of their own, so it has no norms and no percentiles. It doesn’t ask about childhood experiences or self-esteem.

Your answers depend on where you are right now. Someone in a tense relationship answers differently than in a calm stretch. A second run can come out differently, and a point near a border says little about which side you lean toward.

The result works well as a conversation starter, with yourself or with the person you’re with. It doesn’t work as a verdict on you or on anyone else, least of all on people who never took the quiz.

Where can I get help if relationship issues weigh on me?

If relationship issues weigh on you heavily, a counselor or psychotherapist can help, and there’s room there for the questions a quiz only touches. In a crisis in the United States, dial 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. In other countries, contact your local emergency number.