R. Chris Fraley

Image credit: Pexels

Image credit: Pexels

Introduction

Close relationships play a central role in our emotional lives. When life gets us down, we count on others for support and encouragement. When we are away from people we love, we feel isolated and incomplete.

Despite the importance of close relationships in people’s lives, people have profoundly different ways of relating to significant others. Some people are relatively secure in their relationships. They may, for example, feel comfortable opening up to others, depending on them, and trust that others will be there for them when needed. Other people, in contrast, are relatively insecure in their relationships. They are uneasy about depending on others and may worry that other people will not be there for them when they are needed the most.

Psychologists refer to these individual differences as attachment styles. Some of the questionnaires available on our yourPersonality site are designed to assess attachment styles across a variety of relationships, including how you generally think about close relationships (i.e., what is common across your important relationships), as well as how you relate to specific people in your life, such as your parents, friends, and romantic partners.

In this post I examine how secure vs. insecure people tend to be in their relationships. These analyses are based on data collected in the yourPersonality Project. If you are one of the people who contributed data to this project, you can login to your account to see your attachment scores.

What are Attachment Styles? How are they measured?

Attachment styles refer to the unique ways in which people think, feel, and behave in close relationships. In social and personality psychology, they are assessed using questionnaires, such as the one available at yourPersonality. Although attachment styles are often said to be “secure” or “insecure” for the sake of simplicity, the tests our lab uses are a bit more nuanced and are designed to assess attachment with respect to two fundamental dimensions.

The first dimension is called attachment-related anxiety. People who are high in attachment-related anxiety tend to worry about whether others really love them and often fear rejection. People low on this dimension are much less worried about such matters (i.e., they are more secure). The second dimension is referred to as attachment-related avoidance. People who are high on avoidance are less comfortable depending on others and opening up to others compared to those who are low on avoidance.

When these two dimensions are crossed in a 2x2 fashion, they create a conceptual space that attachment theorists find useful for describing the psychological dynamics of attachment:

Secure attachment. The light green lower-left quadrant (low anxiety, low avoidance) represents secure attachment. Secure people are comfortable depending on others and having the other person depend on them. Moreover, they are relatively unconcerned about whether the other person truly cares about them.

Fearful-avoidance.The the light red upper-right portion (high anxiety, high avoidance) represents fearful-avoidant attachment. People who are fearfully avoidant in their relationships are uncomfortable depending on others and serving as a source of support. Moreover, they worry that others may not be there emotionally when they are most needed.

Dismissing-avoidance. The light blue area in the upper-left (low anxiety, high avoidance) represents the dismissing-avoidant attachment. People who are dismissing in their relationships are also not comfortable opening up to others and depending on or having others depend on them. In addition, they are not concerned with the question of whether the other person truly cares about them.

Preoccupied attachment. The light yellow area in the lower-right represents preoccupied attachment. People who are preoccupied in their relationships are worried that the other person is not or will not be available when needed. They would like to depend on the other person and have that person depend on them, but feel that such dependence is not reciprocal.

Although it is sometimes convenient to think about these four regions as being types or categories, research shows that people vary continuously in their attachment styles. Thus, although we label these four regions in the graphs below, we focus on people’s continuous scores on the dimensions of attachment anxiety and avoidance.

General/Global Attachment

Attachment researchers often try to characterize the way a person generally relates to important people in his or her life. This is referred to as the person’s “general” or “global” attachment style. However, researchers sometimes also assess the way people relate to specific people, such as their parents or romantic partners.

In our survey we assess both “general” attachment and relationship-specific attachment. We begin by summarizing the patterns we see with general attachment.

The following graph illustrates people’s general attachment styles, located in the two-dimensional space defined by anxiety and avoidance. This graph is based on data from 70979 people who completed our attachment survey at least once. Each person is represented as a circle. The circles are partly transparent, which makes it easier to see where people tend to be stacked and where people tend to be more sparsely distributed. (Also, a tiny bit of random noise has been added to the points to create some separation between people who have identical scores.)

Notice that people tend to be spread out across the two-dimensional space: Some people are highly anxious about attachment concerns (the far right side of the graph) whereas others are much less so (the far left side of the graph).

It is also interesting that the average person tends to be near the middle of the graph–and half-a-unit above the midpoint of the anxiety scale. This suggests that, on average, people tend to be somewhat insecure about how they think about close relationships in general.

Attachment with Mothers

In addition to assessing how secure vs. insecure people are in general, we also asked people questions about specific relationships in their lives. The following graph illustrates people’s attachment in their relationship with their mothers. Please note that I’ve only illustrated data from people who indicated that their mother was alive at the time of assessment.

Notice that this graph is quite different from the previous one. Most of the scores are in the secure, dismissing, and fearful regions; very few people are in the preoccupied zone. Why? Although there is substantial variation in how avoidant people are in their relationships with their mothers, there is much less variation in attachment anxiety. Most people are not worried that their mothers do not love them and will not be there for them when needed. However, among those who do harbor attachment-related anxieties concerning their mothers, it appears that they have pulled away from her (i.e., they’ve become more avoidant or withdrawn in that relationship) rather than seeking closeness and dependence.

Attachment with Fathers

We observe a similar pattern with respect to people’s attachment styles with their fathers. (As before, these data are only illustrated for people who reported having a father who was alive at the time of assessment.)

Notice that this graph is very similar to the one for attachment to mothers. In fact, people tend to relate to their mothers in ways that are very similar to the way they relate to their fathers. The graph below helps to illustrate this: People who tend to be highly anxious with their mothers also tend to be highly anxious with their fathers. If you’re familiar with statistics, the correlation between these two variables across people is 0.45.

Although people who are insecure with their mothers also tend to be insecure with their fathers, people’s scores are not necessarily identical. On average, people tend to be more insecure with their fathers than their mothers For example, the average avoidance score for fathers is 3.23 whereas the average avoidance score for mothers is 2.84. As a father of two, this makes me want to cry.

Attachment with Romantic Partners

The following graph illustrates people’s attachment styles with respect to their romantic partners (i.e., boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses). These data only come from the 41534 people who reported being in a romantic relationship at the time they filled out the survey.

As with parental relationships, people tend to be secure in their romantic relationships. But the scores are much more spread out than they were in the case of attachment with parents: There are a greater number of cases in the dismissing, fearful, and preoccupied regions than there were with parents.

It is also interesting to consider romantic attachment styles among people who are not in romantic relationships. 28790 respondents who were not in relationships were instructed to imagine being in a romantic relationship and answering the questions based on how they think they would feel and behave in that context.

Notice that this graph looks different from the previous ones. Specifically, the average anxiety score tends to be higher, and the average avoidance score is lower. When single people are imagining what their next relationship may be like, they tend to seem a little more insecure or preoccupied. (The good news is that people who are in relationships are not nearly as anxious about attachment issues as these data would suggest.)

Overall Comparisons

The final graph shows the average attachment style for each kind of relationship on a common graph. This graph is designed to illustrate the ways in which attachment can vary across relationship types. As mentioned before, we can see here that people tend to be more insecure with their fathers than their mothers. Although the average person is not necessarily more anxious in their relationship with their father compared to their mother, they tend to be more avoidant, thereby pushing paternal relationships towards the dismissing attachment region.

People in our sample tended to be secure with their romantic partners. But, as noted previously, there is considerable variation in anxiety: Many romantic relationships fell in the secure and preoccupied region of the space. People considering hypothetical or future relationships (denoted with the * in the graph) tended to skew further towards the anxiety or preoccupation region of the space than those who were actually in relationships and who were rating their actual partner.

Finally, when people were asked to consider the way they relate to others “in general”, they tended to be near the middle of the graph, but leaned slightly towards the preoccupied region of the space.

Technical notes:

This post was created by R. Chris Fraley at the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. To learn more about attachment theory and research, please visit one of our overviews.

This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com.

The data used for this post come from the Voluntary Sample from the yourPersonality Attachment Project.

Cite: Fraley, R. C. (2018, June 14). Attachment Styles: How Secure are People in their Relationships? Retrieved from https://yourpersonality.net/attachment/blog1.html.