What are “attachment styles” and is there science to back them up?

Attachment styles are a popular way to understand how people experience relationships and why they might struggle to be vulnerable with loved ones. They’re a popular topic of conversation—especially in online spaces—so you may be familiar with terms like “secure” and “insecure” attachment, or “anxious” and “avoidant” attachment.

But is there real science behind attachment styles?

The short answer is yes—but there are a lot of misconceptions about what a person’s attachment style can tell you about them.

Psychologists use attachment styles to describe people’s approach to relationships. However, these styles do not necessarily govern people’s relationships, nor can people always be neatly categorized into these different ways of interacting. Instead, attachment styles occur along a continuum, and people can be “secure” in some types of relationships and “insecure” in others.

“There is no magic threshold at which a person suddenly becomes safe or unsafe,” he said R. Chris Fraleya social and personality psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies attachment. Nor is there a certain amount of relationship trauma in someone’s past that determines their attachment style, Fraley told Live Science. People vary widely in how they react to bad parenting or untrustworthy romantic partners, for example.

What are the different attachment styles?

The styles originate from attachment theory, which emerged in the late 1960s from work led by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby hypothesized that if young children did not form secure attachments to a primary caregiver in childhood, they would struggle to do so throughout life.

To test this idea, Ainsworth designed an experiment in which infants around 1 year of age were left by their parents to play alone in an unfamiliar room for several minutes. Then the parent would return. Psychologists would observe how the child reacted to both the parent’s departure and return.

From these observations, Ainsworth postulated four attachment styles:

Secure attachment: Securely attached infants were upset when the parent left and were immediately comforted when the parent returned.
Anxious attachment: Anxiously attached infants were upset when the parent left and hard to comfort when the parent returned.
Avoidant attachment: Avoidantly attached infants barely reacted to their parents’ departure or return.
Disorganized attachment: Disorganized attached infants had unpredictable responses to the arrival or departure of their parents. They may become very anxious or stressed, which may manifest as uncontrollable outbursts or a flat, seemingly emotionless affect.

Over time, other psychologists began to consider these attachment styles in the context of adult relationships.

There are different ways to measure attachment, but a common method that social and personality psychologists use is to measure a person’s attachment avoidance and anxiety, usually through questionnaires about their relationships and behaviors.

Someone who is avoidant in a relationship avoids intimacy or opportunities to reveal their emotions; they have difficulty trusting others and can push people away if they feel they are getting too close. Meanwhile, someone who is anxious in a relationship feels insecure, worries that the other person doesn’t really care about them, and thus can become clingy and uncomfortably dependent on their partner.

Someone low in both avoidance and anxiety is considered securely attached, Fraley said.

“We consider someone to be ‘safe’ in their relationship if they feel comfortable depending on the person, using them as a safe haven in times of distress, and we are assured that the person is truly invested in their well-being.” he said.

On average, there is an association between people’s early childhood experiences and their adult attachment styles, Fraley said. People who experience abuse, neglect, or otherwise cold or unpredictable caregiving are more likely to struggle with attachment in adult relationships. However, he said, childhood experiences do not cement your fate — there are many people who have bad experiences early in life but have secure relationships with adults and vice versa.

“People change, relationship experiences change, and life gets complicated in ways that can’t be captured just by knowing what happened early in a person’s life,” Fraley said. “Most attachment scholars believe that attachment reflects the history of a person’s interpersonal experiences rather than something that happened at one point in time. Although people tend to have some continuity in their interpersonal histories, those twists and turns matter too.”

In other words, attachment styles can change.

“Quite simple strategies, such as simply reflecting and writing about attachment experiences, can lead to short-term increases in security,” Fraley noted. “What we don’t understand well is what it takes to create and sustain long-term change.”

Researchers are working to answer that question, Fraley said. Meanwhile, he and his colleagues run a website with scientifically validated attachment quizzes for anyone wondering what their own styles might be in their own relationships.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide relationship or mental health advice.