Key Takeaways
- Attachment styles can be secure, anxious/ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized, which can affect how people behave and interact in relationships.
- Early experiences with caregivers shape childhood attachment styles, which can also impact attachment patterns in adult relationships.
- Learning more about your attachment style can help you recognize unhealthy patterns and build stronger relationships.
Attachment styles are the different patterns of interacting and behaving in relationships based on early interactions with caregivers. Psychologists typically recognize four main attachment styles: secure, ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized. Each of these attachment styles is marked by patterns that influence how people seek closeness, handle rejection, and interact in romantic relationships during adulthood.
Illustration by Jessica Olah, Verywell
Secure Attachment
As adults, securely attached people:
In relationships, securely attached adults have better interpersonal relationships, higher levels of autonomy, a sense of purpose, and high levels of self-acceptance. Some estimates suggest that 56% of people are secure, 25%, and 19% are ambivalent/anxious.
Ambivalent Attachment
As adults, ambivalently attached people:
- Have a strong fear of abandonment
- Seek closeness and constant reassurance
- Experience lots of relationship anxiety
In relationships, ambivalence causes people to feel reluctant about getting close to others and worry that their partner does not reciprocate their feelings. This leads to frequent breakups marked by extreme distress.
Avoidant Attachment
As adults, people with an avoidant attachment style:
- Have difficulty with intimacy and close relationships.
- Don’t invest much emotion in relationships
- Experience little distress when a relationship ends
- Struggle to share feelings, thoughts, and emotions with partners
In relationships, they often avoid intimacy by using excuses (such as long work hours) or may fantasize about other people during sex. Research has also shown that adults with an avoidant attachment style are more accepting and likely to engage in casual sex.
Disorganized Attachment
As adults, people with a disorganized attachment style:
- Often have a history of early trauma and abuse
- Exhibit a confusing mix of anxious and avoidant behaviors in relationships
- Crave a close connection with a romantic partner
- Struggle to open up and be vulnerable
In relationships, they may seek out a loving relationship and then suddenly push the other person away. They often sabotage their relationships and have a hard time trusting their partners. This style is often associated with unhealthy relationships marked by toxicity, clinginess, poor communication, and even abuse.
What’s Your Attachment Style? Take the Quiz
If you’re unsure about your attachment style, this fast and free quiz can help you identify what your thoughts and behaviors may say about your attachment.
This attachment styles quiz was reviewed by David Susman, PhD.
What Is Attachment?
Attachment is a special emotional relationship that involves an exchange of comfort, care, and pleasure. The roots of research on attachment began with Freud’s theories about love, but another researcher, named John Bowlby, is usually credited as the father of attachment theory.
John Bowlby devoted extensive research to attachment, describing it as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.” Bowlby shared the psychoanalytic view that early childhood experiences are crucial in shaping development and behavior later in life.
Our early attachment styles are established in childhood through the infant/caregiver relationship.
In addition to this, Bowlby believed that attachment had an evolutionary component; it aids in survival. He believed that this propensity to make strong emotional bonds with specific individuals was an essential part of human nature.
Characteristics of Attachment
Bowlby believed that there are four distinguishing characteristics of attachment:
- Proximity maintenance: The desire to be near the people we are attached to.
- Safe haven: Returning to the attachment figure for comfort and safety in the face of a fear or threat.
- Secure base: The attachment figure acts as a base of security from which the child can explore the surrounding environment.
- Separation distress: Anxiety that occurs in the absence of the attachment figure.
Factors That Influence Attachment Styles
Bowlby also made three key propositions about attachment theory:
- Consistent care leads to trust: First, he suggested that when children are raised with confidence that their primary caregiver will be available to them, they are less likely to experience fear than those raised without such conviction.
- Early experiences are critical: Secondly, he believed this confidence is forged during a critical development period, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The expectations formed during that period tend to remain relatively unchanged for the rest of the person’s life.
- Expectations stem from experiences: Finally, he suggested that these expectations that are formed are directly tied to experience. In other words, children develop expectations that their caregivers will be responsive to their needs because, in their experience, their caregivers have been responsive in the past.
Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Assessment
During the 1970s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth further expanded upon Bowlby’s groundbreaking work in her now-famous “Strange Situation” study. The study involved observing children between the ages of 12 to 18 months responding to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mother.
Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Assessment followed this basic sequence:
- The parent and child are alone in a room.
- The child explores the room with parental supervision.
- A stranger enters the room, talks to the parent, and approaches the child.
- The parent quietly leaves the room.
- The parent returns and comforts the child.
Based on these observations, Ainsworth concluded that there were three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment.
Researchers Main and Solomon added a fourth attachment style known as disorganized-insecure attachment.
Numerous studies have supported Ainsworth’s conclusions and additional research has revealed that these early attachment styles can help predict behaviors later in life.
Attachment Through Life
Before you start blaming relationship problems on your parents, it is important to note that attachment styles formed during early childhood are not necessarily identical to those demonstrated in adult romantic attachments.
Later Experiences Matter, Too
It’s important to remember that a lot of time elapses between infancy and adulthood. All of those intervening experiences also play a significant role in shaping adult attachment styles.
Individuals described as ambivalent or avoidant during childhood can develop a secure attachment style as adults, while those with a secure attachment style in childhood may exhibit insecure attachment patterns in adulthood. Basic temperament is also thought to play a partial role in attachment.
So what role might factors such as divorce or parental discord play in forming attachment styles? In one study, researchers found that parental divorce seemed unrelated to attachment style.
Instead, their research indicated that the best predictor of adult attachment style was the perceptions that people have about the quality of their relationships with their parents as well as their parents’ relationship with each other.
However, research in this area indicates that childhood patterns have an important impact on later relationships. The researchers also found varied beliefs about relationships amongst adults with differing attachment styles.
How People With Different Styles View Love
- Securely attached adults tend to believe that romantic love is enduring.
- Ambivalently attached adults report falling in love often.
- Avoidantly attached adults describe love as rare and temporary.
While we cannot say that early attachment styles are identical to adult romantic attachment, research has shown that early attachment styles can help predict behavior patterns in adulthood.
Subsequent research does suggest that parental divorce or abandonment does have an impact on adult children’s attachment styles. Parental divorce or abandonment is linked to more negative feelings about romantic relationships as a higher likelihood of having an anxious and avoidant attachment style.
Understanding Secure Attachment
Children who are securely attached generally become visibly upset when their caregivers leave and are happy when their parents return. When frightened, these children will seek comfort from the parent or caregiver.
Securely attached children readily accept contact initiated by a parent, and they greet the parent’s return with positive behavior. While these children can be comforted to some extent by other people in the absence of a parent or caregiver, they clearly prefer parents to strangers.
Parents of securely attached children tend to play more with their children. Additionally, these parents react more quickly to their children’s needs and are generally more responsive to their children than the parents of insecurely attached children.
Studies have shown that securely attached children are more empathetic during later stages of childhood. These children are also described as less disruptive, less aggressive, and more mature than children with ambivalent or avoidant attachment styles.
As Children
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Separates from parent
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Seeks comfort from parents when frightened
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Greets return of parents with positive emotions
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Prefers parents to strangers
As Adults
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Have trusting, lasting relationships
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Tend to have good self-esteem
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Share feelings with partners and friends
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Seek out social support
While forming a secure attachment with caregivers is normal and expected, as Hazan and Shaver have noted, it doesn’t always happen. Researchers have found a number of different factors that contribute to the development (or lack thereof) of secure attachment, particularly a mother’s responsiveness to her infant’s needs during the first year of a child’s life.
Mothers who respond inconsistently or who interfere with a child’s activities tend to produce infants who explore less, cry more, and are more anxious. Mothers who consistently reject or ignore their infant’s needs tend to produce children who try to avoid contact.
Understanding Ambivalent Attachment
Children who are ambivalently attached tend to be extremely suspicious of strangers. These children display considerable distress when separated from a parent or caregiver but do not seem reassured or comforted by the parent’s return.
In some cases, the child might passively reject the parent by refusing comfort or may openly display direct aggression toward the parent.
According to some older research, ambivalent attachment is relatively uncommon, with only 7% to 15% of infants in the United States displaying this attachment style.
In a review of ambivalent attachment literature, Cassidy and Berlin also found that observational research consistently links ambivalent insecure attachment to low maternal availability. As these children grow older, teachers often describe them as clingy and over-dependent.
As Adults
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Reluctant to become close to others
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Worry that their partner does not love them
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Become very distraught when relationships end
Understanding Avoidant Attachment
Children with avoidant attachment styles tend to avoid parents and caregivers. This avoidance often becomes especially pronounced after a period of absence.
These children might not reject attention from a parent, but neither do they seek out comfort or contact. Children with an avoidant attachment show no preference between a parent and a complete stranger.
As Adults
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May have problems with intimacy
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Invest little emotion in social and romantic relationships
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Unwilling or unable to share thoughts or feelings with others
Understanding Disorganized Attachment
Children with a disorganized-insecure attachment style show a lack of clear attachment behavior. Their actions and responses to caregivers are often a mix of behaviors, including avoidance or resistance.
These children are described as displaying dazed behavior, sometimes seeming either confused or apprehensive in the presence of a caregiver.
At Age 1
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Show a mixture of avoidant and resistant behavior
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May seem dazed, confused, or apprehensive
Researchers suggest that inconsistent behavior on the part of parents might be a contributing factor in this attachment style. Parents who act as figures of both fear and reassurance to a child contribute to a disorganized attachment style.
Because the child feels both comforted and frightened by the parent, confusion results.
