Attachment styles

What are attachment styles?

Attachment styles describe patterns studied in close relationships. The term is popular, but the categories depend on whom researchers are studying and how they measure attachment.

Types of adult attachment styles

Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) describe four adult prototypes: secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and fearful. Other adult assessments measure anxiety and avoidance along continuous dimensions. Fraley and colleagues (2000) examine how well self-report measures capture those dimensions and where their limits lie.

In the four-prototype model, the distinctions concern a person's expectations about themselves and other people:

• Secure: a sense of being worthy of care, combined with an expectation that others can be available and responsive. Closeness and independence can coexist.
• Preoccupied: doubts about one's own worth, combined with a positive view of others. Acceptance from a partner can take on particular importance.
• Dismissing: a positive view of oneself but a negative view of others as sources of support. Independence and distance from intimacy are emphasized.
• Fearful: a negative view of both oneself and others. A person may want connection while avoiding closeness because rejection is expected.

Anxiety and avoidance

Dimensional self-report approaches measure two features:

• Attachment anxiety concerns worries about rejection, abandonment, or a partner's availability.
• Attachment avoidance concerns discomfort with emotional closeness or depending on someone else.

A person receives a position along each dimension; a category compresses that information into a label. Two people described with the same label can still differ substantially in their scores and relationships.

Infant attachment uses different observational classifications. Infant and adult labels should be interpreted within their respective assessment systems. Secure attachment is one related concept whose meaning also needs that context.

Using the labels carefully

A few tidy categories can make a relationship sound easier to explain than it is. Attachment research does not turn a label into a diagnosis, an immutable personality type, or a complete account of why two people behave as they do. Ask which model and measure produced the description before treating it as a fact about someone.