essay about attachment style

Attachment Styles and How They Affect Adult Relationships

Stephanie Huang

Project Manager

MED, Human Development and Psychology, Harvard University

Stephanie Huang holds a Master of Education degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her academic interests mainly lie in the fields of developmental psychology, social-emotional learning, and informal education.

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Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

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On This Page:

Attachment styles refer to patterns of bonding that people learn as children and carry into their adult relationships. They’re typically thought to originate from the type of care one received in their earliest years.

The concept involves one’s confidence in the attachment figure’s availability as a secure base from which one can freely explore the world when not in distress and a safe haven from which one can seek support, protection, and comfort in times of distress.

What are the attachment styles?

• Secure Attachment : Securely attached individuals are comfortable with intimacy and can balance dependence and independence in relationships.
• Preoccupied Attachment (Anxious in Children) : Individuals with this attachment style crave intimacy and can be overly dependent and demanding in relationships.
• Dismissive Attachment (Avoidant in Children) : This style is characterized by a strong sense of self-sufficiency, often to the point of appearing detached. Individuals with dismissive attachment value their independence highly and may seem uninterested in close relationships.
• Fearful Attachment (Disorganized in Children) : Individuals with a fearful attachment style desire close relationships and fear vulnerability. They may behave unpredictably in relationships due to their internal conflict between a desire for intimacy and fear of it.

In humans, the behavioral attachment system does not conclude in infancy or even childhood. Instead, it is active throughout the lifespan, with individuals gaining comfort from physical and mental representations of significant others (Bowlby, 1969).

There appears to be a continuity between early attachment styles and the quality of later adult romantic relationships.

This idea is based on the internal working model , where an infant’s primary attachment forms a model (template) for future relationships.

Attachment Styles

Attachment styles are expectations people develop about relationships with others, and the first attachment is based on the relationship individuals had with their primary caregiver when they were infants.

Attachment styles describe people’s comfort and confidence in close relationships, fear of rejection and yearning for intimacy, and preference for self-sufficiency or interpersonal distance.

Attachment styles comprise cognitions relating to both the self (‘Am I worthy of love’) and others (‘Can I depend on others during times of stress’).

Adult attachment styles derived from past relationship histories are conceptualized as internal working models .

Here, individuals can hold either a positive or negative belief of self and a positive or negative belief of others, thus resulting in one of four possible adult attachment styles.

The model of others can also be conceptualized as the avoidant dimension of attachment, which corresponds to the level of discomfort a person feels regarding psychological intimacy and dependency.

Alternatively, the model of self can be conceptualized as the anxiety dimension of attachment, relating to beliefs about self-worth and whether or not one will be accepted or rejected by others (Collins & Allard, 2001).

Bartholomew and Horowitz proposed four adult attachment styles regarding working models of self and others, including secure, dismissive, preoccupied, and fearful.

Secure Attachment Characteristics

Securely attached adults tend to hold positive self-images and positive images of others, meaning that they have both a sense of worthiness and an expectation that other people are generally accepting and responsive.

As Children

Secure attachment occurs because the mother meets the emotional needs of the infant.

Children with a secure attachment use their mother as a safe base to explore their environment. They are moderately distressed when their mother leaves the room (separation anxiety) and seek contact with their mother when she returns.

They also show moderate stranger anxiety; they show some distress when approached by a stranger.

Adults who demonstrate a secure attachment style value relationships and affirm the impact of relationships on their personalities.

They display a readiness to recall and discuss attachments that suggest much reflection regarding previous relationships.

Secure adults display openness regarding expressing emotions and thoughts with others and are comfortable with depending on others for help while also being comfortable with others depending on them (Cassidy, 1994).

Notably, many secure adults may, in fact, experience negative attachment-related events, yet they can objectively assess people and events and assign a positive value to relationships in general.

Secure lovers characterized their most important romantic relationships as happy and trusting. They can support their partners despite the partners’ faults.

Their relationships also tend to last longer. Secure lovers believe that although romantic feelings may wax and wane, romantic love will never fade.

Through the statistical analysis, secure lovers were found to have had warmer relationships with their parents during childhood.

Preoccupied Attachment Characteristics

Individuals with a preoccupied attachment (called anxious when referring to children) hold a negative self-image and a positive image of others, meaning that they have a sense of unworthiness but generally evaluate others positively.

As such, they strive for self-acceptance by attempting to gain approval and validation from their relationships with significant others. They also require higher levels of contact and intimacy in relationships with others.

Children with this type of attachment are clingy to their mother in a new situation and are not willing to explore – suggesting that they do not have trust in her.

They are extremely distressed when separated from their mother. When the mother returns, they are pleased to see her and go to her for comfort, but they cannot be comforted and may show signs of anger towards her.

This type of attachment style occurs because the mother sometimes meets the infant’s needs and sometimes ignores their emotional needs, i.e., the mother’s behavior is inconsistent.

Such individuals crave intimacy but remain anxious about whether other romantic partners will meet their emotional needs. Autonomy and independence can make them feel anxious.

Additionally, they are preoccupied with dependency on their own parents and still actively struggle to please them.

In addition, they can become distressed should they interpret recognition and value from others as being insincere or failing to meet an appropriate level of responsiveness.

Their attachment system is prone to hyperactivation during times of stress, emotions can become amplified, and overdependence on others is increased (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003).

Preoccupied lovers characterize their most important romantic relationships by obsession, desire for reciprocation and union, emotional highs and lows, and extreme sexual attraction and jealousy.

Preoccupied lovers often believe that it is easy for them to fall in love, yet they also claim that unfading love is difficult to find.

Compared with secure lovers, preoccupied lovers report colder relationships with their parents during childhood.

Anxious attachment  is also known as insecure resistant or anxious ambivalent .

Dismissive Attachment Characteristics

Dismissive attachment style is demonstrated by adults with a positive self-image and a negative image of others. Their internal working model is based on an avoidant attachment established during infancy.

Children with an avoidant attachment do not use the mother as a safe base; they are not distressed on separation from their caregiver and are not joyful when the mother returns. They show little stranger anxiety.

This type of attachment occurs because the mother ignores the emotional needs of the infant.

They prefer to avoid close relationships and intimacy with others to maintain a sense of independence and invulnerability. This means they struggle with intimacy and value autonomy and self-reliance (Cassidy, 1994).

Dismissive-avoidant adults deny experiencing distress associated with relationships and downplay the importance of attachment in general, viewing other people as untrustworthy.

According to Dr. Julie Smith, a clinical psychologist, these are the signs of an avoidant attachment style in adult relationships:

• When your partner seeks intimacy with you, the barriers go up. The more they try to get close, the more you pull back.
• You hold back on starting new relationships because trusting people is so hard.
• You sometimes end relationships to gain a sense of freedom.
• You keep your partner at arm’s length emotionally because it feels safer, but they often accuse you of being distant.

Dismissive lovers are characterized by fear of intimacy, emotional highs and lows, and jealousy. They are often unsure of their feelings toward their romantic partner, believing that romantic love can rarely last and that it is hard for them to fall in love (Hazan & Shaver, 1987).

Proximity seeking is appraised as unlikely to alleviate distress resulting in deliberate deactivation of the attachment system, inhibition of the quest for support, and commitment to handling distress alone, especially distress arising from the failure of the attachment figure to be available and responsive (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003).

Dismissive individuals have learned to suppress their emotions at the behavioral level, although they still experience emotional arousal internally (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2005).

This has negative outcomes in terms of cutting themselves off strong feelings, whether their own or others, thus influencing their experiences of romantic relationships.

Fearful Attachment Characteristics

Adults with a fearful-avoidant attachment style (also referred to as disorganized) hold a negative model of self and also a negative model of others, fearing both intimacy and autonomy.

They display attachment behaviors typical of avoidant children, becoming socially withdrawn and untrusting of others.

The behavior of a fearful-avoidant child is very disorganized, hence why it is also known as disorganized attachment.

If the child and caregiver were to be separated for any amount of time, on the reunion, the child would act conflicted. They may initially run towards their caregiver but then seem to change their mind and either run away or act out.

In the eyes of a child with a fearful avoidant attachment, their caregivers are untrustworthy.

Children with a fearful avoidant attachment are at risk of carrying these behaviors into adulthood if they do not receive support to overcome this. They may struggle to feel secure in any relationship if they do not get help for their attachment style.

“Like dismissing avoidant, they often cope with distancing themselves from relationship partners, but unlike dismissing individuals, they continue to experience anxiety and neediness concerning their partner’s love, reliability, and trustworthiness” (Schachner, Shaver & Mikulincer, 2003, p. 248).

A fearful avoidant prefers casual relationships and may stay in the dating stage of the relationship for a prolonged period as this feels more comfortable for them.

This is not always because they want to, but because they fear getting closer to someone.

A study found that those with a fearful avoidant attachment style are likely to have more sexual partners and higher sexual compliance than other attachment styles (Favez & Tissot, 2019).

They may prefer to have more sexual partners as a way to get physically close to someone without having to also be emotionally vulnerable to them – thus meeting their need for closeness.

They could also be more sexually compliant due to having poorer boundaries and learning in childhood that their boundaries do not matter . It is important to remember that this is not the case for all fearful avoidants.

A partner with this attachment style may prefer to keep their partner at a distance so that things do not get too emotionally intense.

They may be reluctant to share too much of themselves to protect themselves from eventual hurt. If the relationship gets too deep or they are asked to share personal stories, the fearful-avoidant may shut down rapidly.

It is common for those with a fearful attachment style to have grown up in a household that is very chaotic and toxic. As such, the fearful-avoidant may expect that their romantic relationships as adults should also be chaotic.

If they are in a relationship with someone secure and calm, they may be suspicious of why this is. They may believe something must be wrong and may challenge their partner or create a problem to make the relationship more unsettled but familiar to them.

They tend to always expect something bad to happen in their relationship and will likely find any reason to damage the relationship so they do not get hurt.

They may blame or accuse their partner of things they have not done, threaten to leave the relationship, or test their partner to see if this makes them jealous. All these strategies may cause their partner to consider ending the relationship.

Continuity Hypothesis

According to John Bowlby (1969), later relationships are likely to be a continuation of early attachment styles (secure and insecure) because the behavior of the infant’s primary attachment figure promotes an internal working model of relationships, which leads the infant to expect the same in later relationships.

In other words, there will be continuity between early attachment experiences and later relationships. This is known as the continuity hypothesis.

According to the continuity hypothesis, experiences with childhood attachment figures are retained over time and used to guide perceptions of the social world and future interactions with others.

The attachment styles we develop as children through interactions with primary caregivers often persist into adulthood and influence our expectations, emotions, and behaviors in romantic relationships. Specifically, secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment styles tend to be continuous from infancy into adulthood romantic attachments.

Romantic Relationships

Attachment theory , developed by Bowlby to explain emotional bonding between infants and caregivers, has implications for understanding romantic relationships.

There appears to be a continuity between early attachment styles and the quality of later adult romantic relationships. This idea is based on the internal working model, where an infant’s primary attachment forms a model (template) for future relationships.

The internal working model influences a person’s expectation of later relationships thus affects his attitudes towards them. In other words there will be continuity between early attachment experiences and later relationships.

Adult relationships are likely to reflect early attachment style because the experience a person has with their caregiver in childhood would lead to the expectation of the same experiences in later relationships.

This is illustrated in Hazan and Shaver’s love quiz experiment. They conducted a study to collect information on participants’ early attachment styles and attitudes toward loving relationships. They found that those securely attached as infants tended to have happy, lasting relationships.

On the other hand, insecurely attached people found adult relationships more difficult, tended to divorce, and believed love was rare. This supports the idea that childhood experiences have a significant impact on people’s attitudes toward later relationships.

The continuity hypothesis is accused of being reductionist because it assumes that people who are insecurely attached as infants would have poor-quality adult relationships. This is not always the case. Researchers found plenty of people having happy relationships despite having insecure attachments. Therefore, the theory might be an oversimplification.

Brennan and Shaver (1995) discovered that there was a strong association between one’s own attachment type and the romantic partner’s attachment type, suggesting that attachment style could impact one’s choice of partners.

To be more specific, the study found that a secure adult was most likely to be paired with another secure adult, while it was least likely for an avoidant adult to be paired with a secure adult; when a secure adult did not pair with a secure partner, he or she was more likely to have an anxious-preoccupied partner instead.

Moreover, whenever an avoidant or anxious adult did not pair with a secure partner, he or she was more likely to end up with an avoidant partner; an anxious adult was unlikely to be paired with another Anxious adult.

Adult attachment style also impacts how one behaves in romantic relationships (jealousy, trust, proximity-seeking, etc.) and how long these relationships can last, as discussed in earlier paragraphs about Hazan and Shaver’s (1987) findings.

These are, in turn, related to overall relationship satisfaction. Brennan and Shaver (1995) found that inclining toward a secure attachment type was positively correlated with one’s relationship satisfaction, whereas being either more avoidant or anxious was negatively associated with one’s relationship satisfaction.

Regarding attachment-related behaviors within relationships, being inclined to seek proximity and trust others was positively correlated with one’s relationship satisfaction.

Being self-reliant, ambivalent, jealous, clingy, easily frustrated towards one’s partner, or insecure is generally negatively correlated with one’s relationship satisfaction.

The attachment style and related behaviors of one’s partners were also found to impact one’s relationship satisfaction. Not surprisingly, having a Secure partner increases one’s relationship satisfaction.

However, an avoidant partner was the only type of partner that seemed to contribute negatively towards one’s relationship satisfaction, while an Anxious partner had no significant impact in this aspect.

The partner’s inclination to seek proximity and trust others increased one’s satisfaction, while one’s partner’s ambivalence and frustration towards oneself decreased one’s satisfaction.

Parenting Style

There is evidence that attachment styles may be transmitted between generations.

Research indicates an intergenerational continuity between adult attachment types and their children, including children adopting the parenting styles of their parents. People tend to base their parenting style on the internal working model, so the attachment type tends to be passed on through generations of a family.

Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy (1985) found a strong association between the security of the adults’ working model of attachment and that of their infants’, with a particularly strong correlation between mothers and infants (vs. fathers and infants).

Additionally, the same study also found that dismissive adults were often parents to avoidant infants. In contrast, preoccupied adults were often parents to resistant/ambivalent infants, suggesting that how adults conceptualized attachment relationships had a direct impact on how their infants attached to them.

An alternative explanation for continuity in relationships is the temperament hypothesis which argues that an infant’s temperament affects how a parent responds and so may be a determining factor in infant attachment type. The infant’s temperament may explain their issues (good or bad) with relationships in later life.

Mental Health

A new study published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology sheds light on how our attachment styles affect our mental health and behaviors during difficult times like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using advanced statistical techniques, researchers found that people with insecure attachment styles (especially anxious and fearful-avoidant attachments) suffered more depression, anxiety, and loneliness than their securely attached peers.

The researchers surveyed over 1300 UK adults at two time points between April and August 2020 to understand connections between attachment styles, adherence to social distancing guidelines, and mental health. They used cutting-edge causal modeling methods to estimate the likely causal effects.

The results showed that anxious and fearful-avoidant participants had around 5-6% higher depression and anxiety, and were 17-18% lonelier than secure individuals.

Over time, they maintained these elevated mental health symptoms while secure participants’ levels decreased. Greater loneliness explains the poorer mental health of insecure groups.

Avoidant participants were less likely to follow social distancing rules than secure individuals, although the effect size was small. Attachment style did not predict mental health changes from timepoints 1 to 2.

The takeaway?

Our attachment style is a risk factor for worse mental health crises during difficult collective experiences like lockdowns. Insecure individuals are more prone to loneliness driving their anxiety and depression.

The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to alleviate loneliness and promote security.

A limitation is the use of categorical attachment measures, but the advanced statistics provide compelling evidence attachment causally influences our mental health and behaviors during COVID-19 .

Internal Working Models

• The social and emotional responses of the primary caregiver (usually a parent) provide the infant with information about the world and other people and how they view themselves as individuals.
• For example, the extent to which an individual perceives himself/herself as worthy of love and care and information regarding the availability and reliability of others.
• John Bowlby (1969) referred to this knowledge as an internal working model , which begins as a mental and emotional representation of the infant’s first attachment relationship and forms the basis of an individual’s attachment style.
• The attachment continuity hypothesis states that the attachment style formed in infancy between child and caregiver remains relatively stable over time and continues to influence attachment behaviors in future close relationships.
• Romantic relationships are likely to reflect early attachment style because the experience a person has with their caregiver in childhood would lead to the expectation of the same experiences in later relationships, such as parents, friends, and romantic partners (Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991).
• However, there is evidence that attachment styles are fluid and demonstrate fluctuations across the lifespan (Waters, Weinfield, & Hamilton, 2000).
• Other researchers have proposed that rather than a single internal working model, which is generalized across relationships, each type of relationship comprises a different working model. This means a person could be securely attached to their parents but insecurely attached in romantic relationships.

Researchers have proposed that working models are interconnected within a complex hierarchical structure (Collins & Read, 1994).

For example, the highest-level model comprises beliefs and expectations across all types of relationships, and lower-level models hold general rules about specific relations, such as romantic or parental, underpinned by models specific to events within a relationship with a single person.

How Attachment Style Is Measured

Children: ainsworth’s strange situation.

Ainsworth proposed the ‘sensitivity hypothesis,’ which states that the more responsive the mother is to the infant during their early months, the more secure their attachment will be.

To test this, she designed the ‘Strange Situation’ to observe attachment security in children within the context of caregiver relationships.

The child and mother experience a range of scenarios in an unfamiliar room. The procedure involves a series of eight episodes lasting approximately 3 minutes each, whereby a mother, child, and stranger are introduced, separated, and reunited.

Mary Ainsworth classified infants into one of three attachment styles; insecure avoidant (‘A’), secure (‘B’), or insecure ambivalent (‘C’).

A fourth attachment style, disorganized , was later identified (Main & Solomon, 1990).

Each type of attachment style comprises a set of attachment behavioral strategies used to achieve proximity with the caregiver and a feeling of security.

From an evolutionary perspective, an infant’s attachment classification (A, B, or C) is an adaptive response to the characteristics of the caregiving environment.

Ainsworth’s maternal sensitivity hypothesis argues that a child’s attachment style depends on their mother’s behavior towards them.

• ‘Sensitive’ mothers are responsive to the child’s needs and respond to their moods and feelings correctly. Sensitive mothers are more likely to have securely attached children.
• In contrast, mothers who are less sensitive towards their child, for example, those who respond to the child’s needs incorrectly or who are impatient or ignore the child, are likely to have insecurely attached children.

Adult Attachment Interview

Mary Main and her colleagues developed the Adult Attachment Interview that asked for descriptions of early attachment-related events and for the adults’ sense of how these relationships and events had affected adult personalities (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984).

It is noteworthy that the Adult Attachment Interview assessed “the security of the self in relation to attachment in its generality rather than in relation to any particular present or past relationship” (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985).

For example, the general state of mind regarding attachment rather than how one is attached to another specific individual.

Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy (1985) analyzed adults’ responses to the Adult Attachment Interview and observed three major patterns in the way adults recounted and interpreted childhood attachment experiences and relationships in general:

• Secure (Autonomous)
• Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment
• Preoccupied (Anxious) Attachment

Can Your Attachment Style Change?

In the world of attachment studies, a big question is whether our ideas about relationships are kind of like a one-size-fits-all thing, working the same way across all relationships, or if they’re specific to particular relationships.  Some experts, like Kobak (1994), have explored this.

So, one way to look at it is as an “individual difference.” This means that our attachment styles, our inner guides for how we connect with people, stay pretty much the same over time.

These styles are based on our experiences with people we’re close to, like parents, friends, and romantic partners. Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) think that how we act in relationships tends to be consistent, no matter who we’re with.

On the flip side, some folks believe that our attachment styles can change depending on the type of relationship. So, instead of one all-encompassing inner model for relationships, we might have different models for different types of connections. This means that you could be feeling secure with your parents but insecure in your romantic relationships.

A study with young adults showed that people have different attachment styles for various types of relationships, like with parents, friends, and romantic partners (Caron et al., 2012).

Researchers have suggested that these inner models are like a set of Russian dolls, with a big one that covers all types of relationships and smaller ones for specific types, like romance or family. These smaller ones are built on even smaller models, like beliefs about things that happen within one relationship.

There’s evidence supporting the idea that we have multiple internal working models because people can have a lot of different thoughts and feelings about themselves and others. And, while these specific relationship models are related to our overall generalized inner models, the connection isn’t super strong.

It means that our beliefs about ourselves and our partners in one type of relationship are somewhat separate from our broader views (Cozzarelli, Hoekstra, & Bylsma, 2000).

So, in a nutshell, our general ideas about relationships cover a wide range, while our specific thoughts about certain relationships are just a piece of the bigger picture.

Additionally, it is also noteworthy that one’s attachment style may alter over time as well.

Another interesting thing is that your attachment style can change over time . In different studies, about 70% of people had relatively stable attachment styles, while the other 30% were more flexible.

Baldwin and Fehr (1995) discovered that 30% of adults changed their attachment styles fairly quickly, sometimes in as little as a week or a few months. People who initially identified as anxious-ambivalent were the most likely to change.

In a 20-year longitudinal study , Waters et al. (2000) conducted the Adult Attachment Interview with young adults who had participated in the Strange Situation experiment 20 years ago. They found that 72% of the participants received the same secure vs. insecure attachment classification s as they did during infancy.

The remaining participants did change in terms of attachment patterns, with the majority – though not all – of them having experienced major negative life events.

Such findings suggest that attachment style assessments should be interpreted more prudently; furthermore, there is always the possibility for change – and it need not be related to negative events, either.

Bowlby’s (1969) theory holds that internal working models can become more resistant to change over time in a stable environment, but change is still possible over development. Attachment security and insecurity can be seen as diverging pathways – the further one progresses down one path, the harder it is to switch to the other.

Further Information

• How To Know If Your Date Has A Secure Attachment Style
• How To Move From Anxious Attachment To Secure
• BPS Article- Overrated: The predictive power of attachment
• Scoring for the Strange Situation
• A theoretical review of the infant-mother relationship
• Cross-cultural Patterns of Attachment: A Meta-Analysis of the Strange Situation
• How Attachment Style Changes Through Multiple Decades Of Life

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation . Lawrence Erlbaum.

Baldwin, M.W., & Fehr, B. (1995). On the instability of attachment style ratings. Personal Relationships, 2, 247-261.

Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L.M. (1991). Attachment Styles Among Young Adults: A Test of a Four-Category Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61 (2), 226–244.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Volume I. Attachment . London: Hogarth Press.

Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L., & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self-report measurement of adult attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment theory and close relationships (p. 46–76). The Guilford Press.

Brennan, K. A., & Shaver, P. R. (1995). Dimensions of adult attachment, affect regulation, and romantic relationship functioning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21 (3), 267–283.

Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (Eds.). (1999).  Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications . Rough Guides.

Caron, A., Lafontaine, M., Bureau, J., Levesque, C., and Johnson, S.M. (2012). Comparisons of Close Relationships: An Evaluation of Relationship Quality and Patterns of Attachment to Parents, Friends, and Romantic Partners in Young Adults. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 44 (4), 245-256.

Collins, N. L., & Read, S. J. (1994). Cognitive representations of adult attachment: The structure and function of working models. In K. Bartholomew & D. Perlman (Eds.) Advances in personal relationships, Vol. 5: Attachment processes in adulthood  (pp. 53-90). London: Jessica Kingsley.

George, C., Kaplan, N., & Main, M. (1984). The Adult Attachment Interview. Unpublished manuscript, University of California at Berkeley.

Harlow, H. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13 , 573-685.

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (3), 511–524.

Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. In I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), Growing points of attachment theory and research. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50 (1-2), 66-104.

Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1986). Discovery of an insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern. In T. B. Brazelton & M. W. Yogman (Eds.), Affective development in infancy . Ablex Publishing.

Vowels, L. M., Vowels, M. J., Carnelley, K. B., Millings, A., & Gibson‐Miller, J. (2023). Toward a causal link between attachment styles and mental health during the COVID‐19 pandemic.  British Journal of Clinical Psychology .

Waters, E., Merrick, S., Treboux, D., Crowell, J., & Albersheim, L. (2000). Attachment security in infancy and early adulthood: A twenty-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 71 (3), 684-689.

Waters, E., Weinfield, N. S., & Hamilton, C. E. (2000). The stability of attachment security from infancy to adolescence and early adulthood: General discussion.  Child Development, 71 (3), 703-706.

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What Is Attachment Theory?

The Importance of Early Emotional Bonds

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• Attachment Theory
• Stages of Attachment

Attachment Styles

Attachment theory focuses on relationships and bonds (particularly long-term) between people, including those between a parent and child and between romantic partners. It is a psychological explanation for the emotional bonds and relationships between people.

This theory suggests that people are born with a need to forge bonds with caregivers as children. These early bonds may continue to have an influence on attachments throughout life.

History of the Attachment Theory

British psychologist John Bowlby was the first attachment theorist. He described attachment as a "lasting psychological connectedness between human beings." Bowlby was interested in understanding the anxiety and distress that children experience when separated from their primary caregivers.

Thinkers like Freud suggested that infants become attached to the source of pleasure. Infants, who are in the oral stage of development, become attached to their mothers because she fulfills their oral needs.

Some of the earliest behavioral theories suggested that attachment was simply a learned behavior. These theories proposed that attachment was merely the result of the feeding relationship between the child and the caregiver. Because the caregiver feeds the child and provides nourishment, the child becomes attached.

Bowlby observed that feedings did not diminish separation anxiety. Instead, he found that attachment was characterized by clear behavioral and motivation patterns. When children are frightened, they seek proximity from their primary caregiver in order to receive both comfort and care.

Understanding Attachment

Attachment is an emotional bond with another person. Bowlby believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact that continues throughout life. He suggested that attachment also serves to keep the infant close to the mother, thus improving the child's chances of survival.

Bowlby viewed attachment as a product of evolutionary processes. While the behavioral theories of attachment suggested that attachment was a learned process, Bowlby and others proposed that children are born with an innate drive to form attachments with caregivers.

Throughout history, children who maintained proximity to an attachment figure were more likely to receive comfort and protection, and therefore more likely to survive to adulthood. Through the process of natural selection, a motivational system designed to regulate attachment emerged.

The central theme of attachment theory is that primary caregivers who are available and responsive to an infant's needs allow the child to develop a sense of security. The infant learns that the caregiver is dependable, which creates a secure base for the child to then explore the world.

So what determines successful attachment? Behaviorists suggest that it was food that led to forming this attachment behavior, but Bowlby and others demonstrated that nurturance and responsiveness were the primary determinants of attachment.

Ainsworth's "Strange Situation"

In her research in the 1970s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth expanded greatly upon Bowlby's original work. Her groundbreaking "strange situation" study  revealed the profound effects of attachment on behavior. In the study, researchers observed children between the ages of 12 and 18 months as they responded to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mothers.

Based on the responses the researchers observed, Ainsworth described three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment. Later, researchers Main and Solomon (1986) added a fourth attachment style called disorganized-insecure attachment based on their own research.

A number of studies since that time have supported Ainsworth's attachment styles and have indicated that attachment styles also have an impact on behaviors later in life.

Maternal Deprivation Studies

Harry Harlow's infamous studies on maternal deprivation and social isolation during the 1950s and 1960s also explored early bonds. In a series of experiments, Harlow demonstrated how such bonds emerge and the powerful impact they have on behavior and functioning.  

In one version of his experiment, newborn rhesus monkeys were separated from their birth mothers and reared by surrogate mothers. The infant monkeys were placed in cages with two wire-monkey mothers. One of the wire monkeys held a bottle from which the infant monkey could obtain nourishment, while the other wire monkey was covered with a soft terry cloth.

While the infant monkeys would go to the wire mother to obtain food, they spent most of their days with the soft cloth mother. When frightened, the baby monkeys would turn to their cloth-covered mother for comfort and security.

Harlow's work also demonstrated that early attachments were the result of receiving comfort and care from a caregiver rather than simply the result of being fed.

The Stages of Attachment

Researchers Rudolph Schaffer and Peggy Emerson analyzed the number of attachment relationships that infants form in a longitudinal study with 60 infants. The infants were observed every four weeks during the first year of life, and then once again at 18 months.

Based on their observations, Schaffer and Emerson outlined four distinct phases of attachment, including:

Pre-Attachment Stage

From birth to 3 months, infants do not show any particular attachment to a specific caregiver. The infant's signals, such as crying and fussing, naturally attract the attention of the caregiver and the baby's positive responses encourage the caregiver to remain close.

Indiscriminate Attachment

Between 6 weeks of age to 7 months, infants begin to show preferences for primary and secondary caregivers. Infants develop trust that the caregiver will respond to their needs. While they still accept care from others, infants start distinguishing between familiar and unfamiliar people, responding more positively to the primary caregiver.

Discriminate Attachment

At this point, from about 7 to 11 months of age, infants show a strong attachment and preference for one specific individual. They will protest when separated from the primary attachment figure (separation anxiety), and begin to display anxiety around strangers (stranger anxiety).

Multiple Attachments

After approximately 9 months of age, children begin to form strong emotional bonds with other caregivers beyond the primary attachment figure. This often includes a second parent, older siblings, and grandparents.

Factors That Influence Attachment

While this process may seem straightforward, there are some factors that can influence how and when attachments develop, including:

• Opportunity for attachment : Children who do not have a primary care figure, such as those raised in orphanages, may fail to develop the sense of trust needed to form an attachment.
• Quality caregiving : When caregivers respond quickly and consistently, children learn that they can depend on the people who are responsible for their care, which is the essential foundation for attachment. This is a vital factor.

There are four patterns of attachment, including:

• Ambivalent attachment : These children become very distressed when a parent leaves. Ambivalent attachment style is considered uncommon, affecting an estimated 7% to 15% of U.S. children. As a result of poor parental availability, these children cannot depend on their primary caregiver to be there when they need them.
• Avoidant attachment :   Children with an avoidant attachment tend to avoid parents or caregivers, showing no preference between a caregiver and a complete stranger. This attachment style might be a result of abusive or neglectful caregivers. Children who are punished for relying on a caregiver will learn to avoid seeking help in the future.
• Disorganized attachment : These children display a confusing mix of behavior, seeming disoriented, dazed, or confused. They may avoid or resist the parent. Lack of a clear attachment pattern is likely linked to inconsistent caregiver behavior. In such cases, parents may serve as both a source of comfort and fear, leading to disorganized behavior.
• Secure attachment : Children who can depend on their caregivers show distress when separated and joy when reunited. Although the child may be upset, they feel assured that the caregiver will return. When frightened, securely attached children are comfortable seeking reassurance from caregivers. This is the most common attachment style.

The Lasting Impact of Early Attachment

Children who are securely attached as infants tend to develop stronger self-esteem and better self-reliance as they grow older. These children also tend to be more independent, perform better in school, have successful social relationships, and experience less depression and anxiety.

Research suggests that failure to form secure attachments early in life can have a negative impact on behavior in later childhood and throughout life.

Children diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) frequently display attachment problems, possibly due to early abuse, neglect, or trauma. Children adopted after the age of 6 months may have a higher risk of attachment problems.

Attachment Disorders

In some cases, children may also develop attachment disorders. There are two attachment disorders that may occur: reactive attachment disorder (RAD) and disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED).

• Reactive attachment disorder occurs when children do not form healthy bonds with caregivers. This is often the result of early childhood neglect or abuse and results in problems with emotional management and patterns of withdrawal from caregivers.
• Disinhibited social engagement disorder affects a child's ability to form bonds with others and often results from trauma, abandonment, abuse, or neglect. It is characterized by a lack of inhibition around strangers, often leading to excessively familiar behaviors around people they don't know and a lack of social boundaries.

Adult Attachments

Although attachment styles displayed in adulthood are not necessarily the same as those seen in infancy, early attachments can have a serious impact on later relationships. Adults who were securely attached in childhood tend to have good self-esteem, strong romantic relationships, and the ability to self-disclose to others.

A Word From Verywell

Our understanding of attachment theory is heavily influenced by the early work of researchers such as John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Today, researchers recognize that the early relationships children have with their caregivers play a critical role in healthy development. 

Such bonds can also have an influence on romantic relationships in adulthood. Understanding your attachment style may help you look for ways to become more secure in your relationships.

Bowlby J. Attachment and Loss . Basic Books.

Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: Retrospect and prospect . Am J Orthopsychiatry . 1982;52(4):664-678. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1982.tb01456.x

Draper P, Belsky J. Personality development in the evolutionary perspective . J Pers. 1990;58(1):141-61. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1990.tb00911.x

Ainsworth MD, Bell SM. Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation . Child Dev . 1970;41(1):49-67. doi:10.2307/1127388

Main M, Solomon J. Discovery of a new, insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern. In: Brazelton TB, Yogman M, eds., Affective Development in Infancy. Ablex.

Harlow HF. The nature of love . American Psychologist. 1958;13(12):673-685. doi:10.1037/h0047884

Schaffer HR, Emerson PE. The development of social attachments in infancy . Monogr Soc Res Child Dev. 1964;29:1-77. doi:10.2307/1165727

Lyons-Ruth K. Attachment relationships among children with aggressive behavior problems: The role of disorganized early attachment patterns . J Consult Clin Psychol. 1996;64(1):64-73. doi:https:10.1037/0022-006X.64.1.64

Young ES, Simpson JA, Griskevicius V, Huelsnitz CO, Fleck C.  Childhood attachment and adult personality: A life history perspective . Self and Identity . 2019;18:1:22-38. doi:10.1080/15298868.2017.1353540

Ainsworth MDS, Blehar MC, Waters E, Wall S.  Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation . Erlbaum.

Ainsworth MDS. Attachments and other affectional bonds across the life cycle. In: Attachment Across the Life Cycle . Parkes CM, Stevenson-Hinde J, Marris P, eds. Routledge.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Psychology

Introduction to R

An informal workshop on the use of r for simulations and statistical modeling in psychological science 3, adult attachment theory and research.

A Brief Overview

Research on adult attachment is guided by the assumption that the same motivational system that gives rise to the close emotional bond between parents and their children is responsible for the bond that develops between adults in emotionally intimate relationships. The objective of this essay is to provide a brief overview of the history of adult attachment research, the key theoretical ideas, and a sampling of some of the research findings. This essay has been written for people who are interested in learning more about research on adult attachment.

Background: Bowlby's Theory of Attachment

The theory of attachment was originally developed by John Bowlby (1907 - 1990), a British psychoanalyst who was attempting to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who had been separated from their parents. Bowlby observed that separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths (e.g., crying, clinging, frantically searching) to prevent separation from their parents or to reestablish proximity to a missing parent. At the time of Bowlby's initial writings, psychoanalytic writers held that these expressions were manifestations of immature defense mechanisms that were operating to repress emotional pain, but Bowlby noted that such expressions are common to a wide variety of mammalian species, and speculated that these behaviors may serve an evolutionary function.

Drawing on ethological theory, Bowlby postulated that these attachment behaviors , such as crying and searching, were adaptive responses to separation from a primary attachment figure --someone who provides support, protection, and care. Because human infants, like other mammalian infants, cannot feed or protect themselves, they are dependent upon the care and protection of "older and wiser" adults. Bowlby argued that, over the course of evolutionary history, infants who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure via attachment behaviors would be more likely to survive to a reproductive age. According to Bowlby, a motivational system, what he called the attachment behavioral system , was gradually "designed" by natural selection to regulate proximity to an attachment figure.

The attachment behavior system is an important concept in attachment theory because it provides the conceptual linkage between ethological models of human development and modern theories on emotion regulation and personality. According to Bowlby, the attachment system essentially "asks" the following fundamental question: Is the attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive? If the child perceives the answer to this question to be "yes," he or she feels loved, secure, and confident, and, behaviorally, is likely to explore his or her environment, play with others, and be sociable. If, however, the child perceives the answer to this question to be "no," the child experiences anxiety and, behaviorally, is likely to exhibit attachment behaviors ranging from simple visual searching on the low extreme to active following and vocal signaling on the other (see Figure 1). These behaviors continue until either the child is able to reestablish a desirable level of physical or psychological proximity to the attachment figure, or until the child "wears down," as may happen in the context of a prolonged separation or loss. In such cases, Bowlby believed that young children experienced profound despair and depression.

Individual Differences in Infant Attachment Patterns

Although Bowlby believed that the basic dynamics described above captured the normative dynamics of the attachment behavioral system, he recognized that there are individual differences in the way children appraise the accessibility of the attachment figure and how they regulate their attachment behavior in response to threats. However, it wasn't until his colleague, Mary Ainsworth (1913 – 1999), began to systematically study infant-parent separations that a formal understanding of these individual differences was articulated. Ainsworth and her students developed a technique called the strange situation --a laboratory paradigm for studying infant-parent attachment. In the strange situation, 12-month-old infants and their parents are brought to the laboratory and, systematically, separated from and reunited with one another. In the strange situation, most children (i.e., about 60%) behave in the way implied by Bowlby's "normative" theory. They become upset when the parent leaves the room, but, when he or she returns, they actively seek the parent and are easily comforted by him or her. Children who exhibit this pattern of behavior are often called secure . Other children (about 20% or less) are ill-at-ease initially, and, upon separation, become extremely distressed. Importantly, when reunited with their parents, these children have a difficult time being soothed, and often exhibit conflicting behaviors that suggest they want to be comforted, but that they also want to "punish" the parent for leaving. These children are often called anxious-resistant . The third pattern of attachment that Ainsworth and her colleagues documented is called avoidant . Avoidant children (about 20%) don't appear too distressed by the separation, and, upon reunion, actively avoid seeking contact with their parent, sometimes turning their attention to play objects on the laboratory floor.

Ainsworth's work was important for at least three reasons. First, she provided one of the first empirical demonstrations of how attachment behavior is patterned in both safe and frightening contexts. Second, she provided the first empirical taxonomy of individual differences in infant attachment patterns. According to her research, at least three types of children exist: those who are secure in their relationship with their parents, those who are anxious-resistant, and those who are anxious-avoidant. Finally, she demonstrated that these individual differences were correlated with infant-parent interactions in the home during the first year of life. Children who appear secure in the strange situation, for example, tend to have parents who are responsive to their needs. Children who appear insecure in the strange situation (i.e., anxious-resistant or avoidant) often have parents who are insensitive to their needs, or inconsistent or rejecting in the care they provide. In the years that have followed, a number of researchers have demonstrated links between early parental sensitivity and responsiveness and attachment security.

Adult Romantic Relationships

Although Bowlby was primarily focused on understanding the nature of the infant-caregiver relationship, he believed that attachment characterized human experience from "the cradle to the grave." It was not until the mid-1980's, however, that researchers began to take seriously the possibility that attachment processes may play out in adulthood. Hazan and Shaver (1987) were two of the first researchers to explore Bowlby's ideas in the context of romantic relationships. According to Hazan and Shaver, the emotional bond that develops between adult romantic partners is partly a function of the same motivational system--the attachment behavioral system--that gives rise to the emotional bond between infants and their caregivers. Hazan and Shaver noted that the relationship between infants and caregivers and the relationship between adult romantic partners share the following features:

• both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive
• both engage in close, intimate, bodily contact
• both feel insecure when the other is inaccessible
• both share discoveries with one another
• both play with one another's facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another
• both engage in "baby talk"

On the basis of these parallels, Hazan and Shaver argued that adult romantic relationships, like infant-caregiver relationships, are attachments, and that romantic love is a property of the attachment behavioral system, as well as the motivational systems that give rise to caregiving and sexuality.

Three Implications of Adult Attachment Theory

The idea that romantic relationships may be attachment relationships has had a profound influence on modern research on close relationships. There are at least three critical implications of this idea. First, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then we should observe the same kinds of individual differences in adult relationships that Ainsworth observed in infant-caregiver relationships . We may expect some adults, for example, to be secure in their relationships--to feel confident that their partners will be there for them when needed, and open to depending on others and having others depend on them. We should expect other adults, in contrast, to be insecure in their relationships. For example, some insecure adults may be anxious-resistant : they worry that others may not love them completely, and be easily frustrated or angered when their attachment needs go unmet. Others may be avoidant : they may appear not to care too much about close relationships, and may prefer not to be too dependent upon other people or to have others be too dependent upon them.

Second, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then the way adult relationships "work" should be similar to the way infant-caregiver relationships work . In other words, the same kinds of factors that facilitate exploration in children (i.e., having a responsive caregiver) should facilitate exploration among adults (i.e., having a responsive partner). The kinds of things that make an attachment figure "desirable" for infants (i.e., responsiveness, availability) are the kinds of factors adults should find desirable in romantic partners. In short, individual differences in attachment should influence relational and personal functioning in adulthood in the same way they do in childhood.

Third, whether an adult is secure or insecure in his or her adult relationships may be a partial reflection of his or her experiences with his or her primary caregivers . Bowlby believed that the mental representations or working models (i.e., expectations, beliefs, "rules" or "scripts" for behaving and thinking) that a child holds regarding relationships are a function of his or her caregiving experiences. For example, a secure child tends to believe that others will be there for him or her because previous experiences have led him or her to this conclusion. Once a child has developed such expectations, he or she will tend to seek out relational experiences that are consistent with those expectations and perceive others in a way that is colored by those beliefs. According to Bowlby, this kind of process should promote continuity in attachment patterns over the life course, although it is possible that a person's attachment pattern will change if his or her relational experiences are inconsistent with his or her expectations. In short, if we assume that adult relationships are attachment relationships, it is possible that children who are secure as children will grow up to be secure in their romantic relationships. Or, relatedly, that people who are secure as adults in their relationships with their parents will be more likely to forge secure relationships with new partners.

In the sections below I briefly address these three implications in light of early and contemporary research on adult attachment.

Do We Observe the Same Kinds of Attachment Patterns Among Adults that We Observe Among Children?

The earliest research on adult attachment involved studying the association between individual differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their relationships and their memories for what their relationships with their parents are like. Hazan and Shaver (1987) developed a simple questionnaire to measure these individual differences. (These individual differences are often referred to as attachment styles , attachment patterns , attachment orientations , or differences in the organization of the attachment system .) In short, Hazan and Shaver asked research subjects to read the three paragraphs listed below, and indicate which paragraph best characterized the way they think, feel, and behave in close relationships:

A. I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. B. I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don't worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me. C. I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away.

Based on this three-category measure , Hazan and Shaver found that the distribution of categories was similar to that observed in infancy. In other words, about 60% of adults classified themselves as secure (paragraph B), about 20% described themselves as avoidant (paragraph A), and about 20% described themselves as anxious-resistant (paragraph C).

Although this measure served as a useful way to study the association between attachment styles and relationship functioning, it didn't allow a full test of the hypothesis that the same kinds of individual differences observed in infants might be manifest among adults. (In many ways, the Hazan and Shaver measure assumed this to be true.) Subsequent research has explored this hypothesis in a variety of ways. For example, Kelly Brennan and her colleagues collected a number of statements (e.g., "I believe that others will be there for me when I need them") and studied the way these statements "hang together" statistically (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998). Brennan's findings suggested that there are two fundamental dimensions with respect to adult attachment patterns (see Figure 2). One critical variable has been labeled attachment-related anxiety . People who score high on this variable tend to worry whether their partner is available, responsive, attentive, etc. People who score on the low end of this variable are more secure in the perceived responsiveness of their partners. The other critical variable is called attachment-related avoidance . People on the high end of this dimension prefer not to rely on others or open up to others. People on the low end of this dimension are more comfortable being intimate with others and are more secure depending upon and having others depend upon them. A prototypical secure adult is low on both of these dimensions.

Brennan's findings are critical because recent analyses of the statistical patterning of behavior among infants in the strange situation reveal two functionally similar dimensions: one that captures variability in the anxiety and resistance of the child and another that captures variability in the child's willingness to use the parent as a safe haven for support (see Fraley & Spieker, 2003a, 2003b). Functionally, these dimensions are similar to the two-dimensions uncovered among adults, suggesting that similar patterns of attachment exist at different points in the life span.

In light of Brennan's findings, as well as taxometric research published by Fraley and Waller (1998), most researchers currently conceptualize and measure individual differences in attachment dimensionally rather than categorically. That is, it is assumed that attachment styles are things that vary in degree rather than kind. The most popular measures of adult attachment style are Brennan, Clark, and Shaver's (1998) ECR and Fraley, Waller, and Brennan's (2000) ECR-R--a revised version of the ECR. [ Click here to take an on-line quiz designed to determine your attachment style based on these two dimensions. ] Both of these self-report instruments provide continuous scores on the two dimensions of attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. [ Click here to learn more about self-report measures of individual differences in adult attachment. ]

Do Adult Romantic Relationships "Work" in the Same Way that Infant-Caregiver Relationships Work?

There is now an increasing amount of research that suggests that adult romantic relationships function in ways that are similar to infant-caregiver relationships, with some noteworthy exceptions, of course. Naturalistic research on adults separating from their partners at an airport demonstrated that behaviors indicative of attachment-related protest and caregiving were evident, and that the regulation of these behaviors was associated with attachment style (Fraley & Shaver, 1998). For example, while separating couples generally showed more attachment behavior than nonseparating couples, highly avoidant adults showed much less attachment behavior than less avoidant adults. In the sections below I discuss some of the parallels that have been discovered between the way that infant-caregiver relationships and adult romantic relationships function.

Partner selection Cross-cultural studies suggest that the secure pattern of attachment in infancy is universally considered the most desirable pattern by mothers (see van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 1999). For obvious reasons there is no similar study asking infants if they would prefer a security-inducing attachment figure. Adults seeking long-term relationships identify responsive caregiving qualities, such as attentiveness, warmth, and sensitivity, as most "attractive" in potential dating partners (Zeifman & Hazan, 1997). Despite the attractiveness of secure qualities, however, not all adults are paired with secure partners. Some evidence suggests that people end up in relationships with partners who confirm their existing beliefs about attachment relationships (Frazier et al., 1997).

Secure base and safe haven behavior In infancy, secure infants tend to be the most well adjusted, in the sense that they are relatively resilient, they get along with their peers, and are well liked. Similar kinds of patterns have emerged in research on adult attachment. Overall, secure adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than insecure adults. Their relationships are characterized by greater longevity, trust, commitment, and interdependence (e.g., Feeney, Noller, & Callan, 1994), and they are more likely to use romantic partners as a secure base from which to explore the world (e.g., Fraley & Davis, 1997). A large proportion of research on adult attachment has been devoted to uncovering the behavioral and psychological mechanisms that promote security and secure base behavior in adults. There have been two major discoveries thus far. First and in accordance with attachment theory, secure adults are more likely than insecure adults to seek support from their partners when distressed. Furthermore, they are more likely to provide support to their distressed partners (e.g., Simpson et al., 1992). Second, the attributions that insecure individuals make concerning their partner's behavior during and following relational conflicts exacerbate, rather than alleviate, their insecurities (e.g., Simpson et al., 1996).

Avoidant Attachment and Defense Mechanisms According to attachment theory, children differ in the kinds of strategies they use to regulate attachment-related anxiety. Following a separation and reunion, for example, some insecure children approach their parents, but with ambivalence and resistance, whereas others withdraw from their parents, apparently minimizing attachment-related feelings and behavior. One of the big questions in the study of infant attachment is whether children who withdraw from their parents--avoidant children--are truly less distressed or whether their defensive behavior is a cover-up for their true feelings of vulnerability. Research that has measured the attentional capacity of children, heart rate, or stress hormone levels suggests that avoidant children are distressed by the separation despite the fact that they come across in a cool, defensive manner.

Recent research on adult attachment has revealed some interesting complexities concerning the relationships between avoidance and defense. Although some avoidant adults, often called fearfully-avoidant adults, are poorly adjusted despite their defensive nature, others, often called dismissing-avoidant adults, are able to use defensive strategies in an adaptive way. For example, in an experimental task in which adults were instructed to discuss losing their partner, Fraley and Shaver (1997) found that dismissing individuals (i.e., individuals who are high on the dimension of attachment-related avoidance but low on the dimension of attachment-related anxiety) were just as physiologically distressed (as assessed by skin conductance measures) as other individuals. When instructed to suppress their thoughts and feelings, however, dismissing individuals were able to do so effectively. That is, they could deactivate their physiological arousal to some degree and minimize the attention they paid to attachment-related thoughts. Fearfully-avoidant individuals were not as successful in suppressing their emotions.

Are Attachment Patterns Stable from Infancy to Adulthood?

Perhaps the most provocative and controversial implication of adult attachment theory is that a person's attachment style as an adult is shaped by his or her interactions with parental attachment figures. Although the idea that early attachment experiences might have an influence on attachment style in romantic relationships is relatively uncontroversial, hypotheses about the source and degree of overlap between the two kinds of attachment orientations have been controversial.

There are at least two issues involved in considering the question of stability: (a) How much similarity is there between the security people experience with different people in their lives (e.g., mothers, fathers, romantic partners)? and (b) With respect to any one of these relationships, how stable is security over time?

With respect to this first issue, it appears that there is a modest degree of overlap between how secure people feel with their mothers, for example, and how secure they feel with their romantic partners. Fraley, for example, collected self-report measures of one's current attachment style with a significant parental figure and a current romantic partner and found correlations ranging between approximately .20 to .50 (i.e., small to moderate) between the two kinds of attachment relationships. [ Click here to take an on-line quiz designed to assess the similarity between your attachment styles with different people in your life. ]

With respect to the second issue, the stability of one's attachment to one's parents appears to be equal to a correlation of about .25 to .39 (Fraley, 2002). There is only one longitudinal study of which we are aware that assessed the link between security at age 1 in the strange situation and security of the same people 20 years later in their adult romantic relationships. This unpublished study uncovered a correlation of .17 between these two variables (Steele, Waters, Crowell, & Treboux, 1998).

The association between early attachment experiences and adult attachment styles has also been examined in retrospective studies. Hazan and Shaver (1987) found that adults who were secure in their romantic relationships were more likely to recall their childhood relationships with parents as being affectionate, caring, and accepting (see also Feeney & Noller, 1990).

Based on these kinds of studies, it seems likely that attachment styles in the child-parent domain and attachment styles in the romantic relationship domain are only moderately related at best. What are the implications of such findings for adult attachment theory? According to some writers, the most important proposition of the theory is that the attachment system, a system originally adapted for the ecology of infancy, continues to influence behavior, thought, and feeling in adulthood (see Fraley & Shaver, 2000). This proposition may hold regardless of whether individual differences in the way the system is organized remain stable over a decade or more, and stable across different kinds of intimate relationships.

Although the social and cognitive mechanisms invoked by attachment theorists imply that stability in attachment style may be the rule rather than the exception, these basic mechanisms can predict either long-run continuity or discontinuity, depending on the precise ways in which they are conceptualized (Fraley, 2002). Fraley (2002) discussed two models of continuity derived from attachment theory that make different predictions about long-term continuity even though they were derived from the same basic theoretical principles. Each model assumes that individual differences in attachment representations are shaped by variation in experiences with caregivers in early childhood, and that, in turn, these early representations shape the quality of the individual's subsequent attachment experiences. However, one model assumes that existing representations are updated and revised in light of new experiences such that older representations are eventually "overwritten." Mathematical analyses revealed that this model predicts that the long-term stability of individual differences will approach zero. The second model is similar to the first, but makes the additional assumption that representational models developed in the first year of life are preserved (i.e., they are not overwritten) and continue to influence relational behavior throughout the life course. Analyses of this model revealed that long-term stability can approach a non-zero limiting value. The important point here is that the principles of attachment theory can be used to derive developmental models that make strikingly different predictions about the long-term stability of individual differences. In light of this finding, the existence of long-term stability of individual differences should be considered an empirical question rather than an assumption of the theory.

Outstanding Questions and Future Directions for Research on Adult Attachment

There are a number of questions that current and future research on attachment needs to address. For example, it is probably the case that, while some romantic relationships are genuine attachment relationships, others are not. It will be necessary for future researchers to find ways to better determine whether a relationship is actually serving attachment-related functions. Second, although it is clear why attachment behavior may serve an important evolutionary function in infancy, it is not clear whether attachment serves an important evolutionary function among adults. Third, we still don't have a strong understanding of the precise factors that may change a person's attachment style. In the interest of improving people's lives, it will be necessary to learn more about the factors that promote attachment security and relational well-being.

© 2018 R. Chris Fraley

To learn more about attachment theory and research, please check out the book Omri, Gery, and I wrote.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Attachment style predicts affect, cognitive appraisals, and social functioning in daily life.

• 1 Departament de Psicologia Clínica i de la Salut, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
• 2 Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
• 3 Sant Pere Claver – Fundació Sanitària, Barcelona, Spain
• 4 Centre for Biomedical Research Network on Mental Health, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
• 5 Red de Excelencia PROMOSAM (PSI2014-56303-REDT), MINECO, Spain

The way in which attachment styles are expressed in the moment as individuals navigate their real-life settings has remained an area largely untapped by attachment research. The present study examined how adult attachment styles are expressed in daily life using experience sampling methodology (ESM) in a sample of 206 Spanish young adults. Participants were administered the Attachment Style Interview (ASI) and received personal digital assistants that signaled them randomly eight times per day for 1 week to complete questionnaires about their current experiences and social context. As hypothesized, participants’ momentary affective states, cognitive appraisals, and social functioning varied in meaningful ways as a function of their attachment style. Individuals with an anxious attachment, as compared with securely attached individuals, endorsed experiences that were congruent with hyperactivating tendencies, such as higher negative affect, stress, and perceived social rejection. By contrast, individuals with an avoidant attachment, relative to individuals with a secure attachment, endorsed experiences that were consistent with deactivating tendencies, such as decreased positive states and a decreased desire to be with others when alone. Furthermore, the expression of attachment styles in social contexts was shown to be dependent upon the subjective appraisal of the closeness of social contacts, and not merely upon the presence of social interactions. The findings support the ecological validity of the ASI and the person-by-situation character of attachment theory. Moreover, they highlight the utility of ESM for investigating how the predictions derived from attachment theory play out in the natural flow of real life.

Introduction

Attachment theory ( Bowlby, 1973 , 1980 , 1982 ), along with its theoretical and empirical extensions (e.g., Main, 1990 ; Schore, 1994 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2003 ), is a useful and influential framework for understanding personality development, relational processes, and the regulation of affect. Over the past two decades, an increasing body of research has accrued on the origins and correlates of individual differences in adult attachment styles ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 ). However, an important limitation of previous studies is that many failed to take into account the effect of context on the expression of attachment styles. This is surprising given that attachment theory is in essence a “person by situation” interactionist theoretical framework ( Campbell and Marshall, 2011 ; Simpson and Winterheld, 2012 ), and possibly derives from the scarcity of methods allowing for such a dynamic approach. Although significant insights have been obtained by focusing on individual differences in retrospective reports of the expression of attachment, at present there is scant knowledge regarding how attachment styles are expressed in the moment and how they play out in real-world settings ( Torquati and Raffaelli, 2004 ). The current study extends previous work by employing experience sampling methodology (ESM), a time-sampling procedure, to examine the daily life expression of adult attachment styles in a non-clinical sample of young adults.

Attachment theory is a lifespan approach that postulates that people are born with an innate motivational system (termed the attachment behavioral system) that becomes activated during times of actual or symbolic threat, prompting the individual to seek proximity to particular others with the goal of alleviating distress and obtaining a sense of security ( Bowlby, 1982 ). A cornerstone of the theory is that individuals build cognitive-affective representations, or “internal working models” of the self and others, based on their cumulative history of interactions with attachment figures ( Bowlby, 1973 ; Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991 ). These models guide how information from the social world is appraised and play an essential role in the process of affect regulation throughout the lifespan ( Kobak and Sceery, 1988 ; Collins et al., 2004 ).

The majority of research on adult attachment has centered on attachment styles and their measurement (for a review, see Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 ). In broad terms, attachment styles may be conceptualized in terms of security vs. insecurity. Repeated interactions with emotionally accessible and sensitively responsive attachment figures promote the formation of a secure attachment style, characterized by positive internal working models and effective strategies for coping with distress. Conversely, repeated interactions with unresponsive or inconsistent figures result in the risk of developing insecure attachment styles, characterized by negative internal working models of the self and/or others and the use of less optimal affect regulation strategies ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 ).

Although there is a wide range of conceptualizations and measures of attachment insecurity, these are generally defined by high levels of anxiety and/or avoidance in close relationships. Attachment anxiety reflects a desire for closeness and a worry of being rejected by or separated from significant others, whereas attachment avoidance reflects a strong preference for self-reliance, as well as discomfort with closeness and intimacy with others ( Brennan et al., 1998 ; Bifulco and Thomas, 2013 ). These styles involve distinct secondary attachment strategies for regulating distress – individuals with attachment anxiety tend to use a hyperactivating (or maximizing) strategy, while individuals with attachment avoidance tend to rely on a deactivating (or minimizing) strategy ( Cassidy and Kobak, 1988 ; Main, 1990 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2003 , 2008 ). Indeed, previous empirical studies indicate that attachment anxiety is associated with increased negative emotional responses, heightened detection of threats in the environment, and negative views of the self ( Griffin and Bartholomew, 1994 ; Mikulincer and Orbach, 1995 ; Fraley et al., 2006 ; Ein-Dor et al., 2011 ). By contrast, attachment avoidance is associated with emotional inhibition or suppression, the dismissal of threatening events, and inflation of self-conceptions ( Fraley and Shaver, 1997 ; Gjerde et al., 2004 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 ).

Relatively few studies have examined attachment styles in the context of everyday life. Most of these studies have used event-contingent sampling techniques, such as the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR; Reis and Wheeler, 1991 ), and have primarily focused on assessing how individual differences in self-reported attachment are related to responses to social interactions in general and/or to specific social interactions (e.g., with acquaintances, friends, family members, close others, same- and opposite-sex peers). Despite various methodological and attachment classification differences that complicate direct comparison of these findings, this body of research has shown that compared to secure attachment, anxious (or preoccupied) attachment is associated with more variability in terms of positive emotions and promotive interactions (a composite measure of disclosure and support; Tidwell et al., 1996 ), lower self-esteem ( Pietromonaco and Barrett, 1997 ), greater feelings of anxiety and rejection, as well as perceiving more negative emotions in others ( Kafetsios and Nezlek, 2002 ). In contrast, compared to secure attachment, avoidant (or dismissing) attachment has been associated with lower levels of happiness and self-disclosure ( Kafetsios and Nezlek, 2002 ), lower perceived quality of interactions with romantic partners ( Sibley and Liu, 2006 ), a tendency to differentiate less between close and non-close others in terms of disclosure ( Pietromonaco and Barrett, 1997 ), and higher negative affect along with lower positive affect, intimacy, and enjoyment, predominantly in opposite-sex interactions ( Tidwell et al., 1996 ).

Studies using event-contingent methods such as the RIR have shed light on how varying social encounters trigger differential responses as a function of attachment style; however, since the focus is on objectively defined interactional phenomena (e.g., interactions lasting 10 min or longer), these types of paradigms are unable to capture the wide range of naturally occurring subjective states and appraisals that take place as individuals navigate through their daily life. Unlike previous research, the current study used ESM, a within-day self-assessment technique in which participants are prompted at random or predetermined intervals to answer brief questionnaires about their current experiences. ESM offers several advantages compared to traditional laboratory or clinic-based assessment procedures (e.g., deVries, 1992 ; Hektner et al., 2007 ; Conner et al., 2009 ). These include: (1) ESM repeatedly assesses participants in their daily environment, thereby enhancing ecological validity, (2) it captures information at the time of the signal, thus minimizing retrospective recall bias, and (3) it allows for investigating the context of participants’ experiences.

To our knowledge, the work of Torquati and Raffaelli (2004) is the only ESM study that has assessed how daily life experiences of emotion differed as a function of attachment category (secure vs. insecure) and context (being alone or in the presence of familiar intimates). In a sample of undergraduate students, they found that both when in the presence of familiar intimates and when alone, the secure group reported higher levels of emotions relating to energy and connection than the insecure group. Additionally, when alone, securely attached individuals reported greater levels of positive affect than insecurely attached individuals. Moreover, although the two groups did not differ in the variability of their emotional states, participants with a secure style endorsed more extreme positive emotional states across all social contexts, whereas those with insecure styles endorsed more extreme negative emotional states, particularly when they were alone. Their results supported the notion that attachment styles exert a broad influence on affective experiences; nevertheless, an important limitation of this study was that it only reported findings comparing secure vs. insecure participants, and thus it did not provide information on how the subtypes of insecure attachment differ from the secure style. Therefore, further empirical research is needed to examine how attachment styles are expressed in the flow of daily life and whether the interplay between attachment styles and the features of the environment gives rise to different patterns of experiences in the moment. Demonstrating that attachment styles exhibit meaningful associations with real-world experiences in the domains that are theoretically influenced by an individual’s attachment style would provide evidence of the validity of the attachment style construct in the immediate context in which the person is embedded. Moreover, identifying attachment-style variations in how the social context relates to momentary experiences would enhance our understanding of how attachment styles operate in the immediate social milieu.

The Current Study

The present study examines the expression of secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment styles in daily life using ESM. It extends previous research in several ways. First, the current study employs an interview, rather than a self-report measure, to assess attachment styles. The Attachment Style Interview (ASI; Bifulco et al., 2002 ) is a semi-structured interview that belongs to the social psychology approach to attachment research and has the strength of utilizing contextualized narrative and objective examples to determine the individual’s current attachment style. Second, this study examines the expression of attachment styles at random time points across participants’ daily life, not just during particular events such as social interactions, and thus captures a more extensive profile of person-environment transactions. Third, this study examines the impact of two aspects of the social context on the expression of attachment styles in the moment: social contact and perceived social closeness when with others. None of the previous diary studies have examined attachment style differences in the effects of social contact and social closeness on participants’ subjective appraisals of themselves (e.g., their coping capabilities), their current situation (e.g., how stressful it is), or their social functioning (e.g., preference for being alone).

The first aim of this study was to examine the associations between attachment styles and measures of affect, cognitive appraisals (about the self, others, and the situation), and social functioning as they occur in daily life. Following attachment theory, it was hypothesized that compared to both insecure attachment groups, secure attachment would be associated with higher ratings of positive affect, self-esteem, feeling cared for, as well as with experiencing more closeness in social interactions. In terms of insecure attachment, a different pattern was predicted for the anxious and avoidant styles. We hypothesized that compared to securely attached participants, those with anxious attachment would endorse higher levels of negative affect, affect instability, subjective stress, feeling unable to cope, and perceived social rejection. We predicted that avoidant attachment, as compared with the secure style, would be associated with lower ratings of positive affect, a decreased desire to be with others when alone, and an increased preference for being alone when with others. In essence, this would provide evidence of ecological construct validity of the attachment styles.

The second aim of the current study was to investigate whether attachment styles moderate the associations of social contact and social closeness with momentary affect, appraisals, and social functioning. Given the lack of engagement and emotional distance that characterizes avoidant attachment, it was hypothesized that social contact would elicit less positive affect in avoidant participants as compared to their secure peers. Additionally, given that one of the most salient features of anxious individuals is that they desire closeness but fear rejection and abandonment, it was predicted that anxious participants would experience higher negative affect with people with whom they did not feel close, than would those with a secure attachment.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Participants were 206 (44 men, 162 women) undergraduate students recruited from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. The mean age of the sample was 21.3 years ( SD = 2.4). An additional eight participants enrolled in the study and completed the interview phase, but were omitted from the analyses due to failing to complete the ESM protocols. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the University Ethics Committee. Participants provided written informed consent and were paid for their participation.

Materials and Procedure

Participants were assessed with the ASI, along with other interview and questionnaire measures not used in the present study. The ASI is a semi-structured interview that measures current attachment style through questions that elicit the content and context of interpersonal attitudes and behaviors ( Bifulco, 2002 ). The interview is composed of two parts. In the first part, a behavioral evaluation of the ability to make and maintain relationships is made (on a 4-point scale from “marked” to “little/none”) on the basis of the overall quality of the person’s ongoing relationships with up to three supportive figures (referred to as “very close others”), including partner if applicable. The term “behavioral evaluation” denotes that ratings are based on descriptions of actual behavior (such as instances of recent confiding, emotional support received, and presence of tension/conflicts with each “very close other”). The second part of the ASI assesses individuals’ feelings and thoughts about themselves in relation to others. Specifically, ratings are obtained for seven attitudinal scales that reflect anxiety and avoidance in relationships. These scales are: fear of rejection, fear of separation, desire for company, mistrust, anger, self-reliance, and constraints on closeness. Ratings on the attitudinal scales are based on the intensity of the attitude and the level of generalization. Most of them are rated on 4-point scales from “marked” to “little/none.”

The scores obtained throughout the interview are combined to enable the classification of the person’s attachment profile, which encompasses both the attachment style categorization as well as the degree of severity for the insecure styles. Note that scoring the ASI and deriving the person’s attachment profile is done on the basis of prior training, according to established rating rules and benchmark thresholds. Further details on the scoring scheme and case examples can be found in Bifulco and Thomas (2013) . Previous studies have provided evidence for the reliability and validity of the ASI ( Bifulco et al., 2004 ; Bifulco and Thomas, 2013 ). In the present study, the three main attachment style categories (i.e., secure, anxious, and avoidant) were used for analyses.

Experience sampling methodology data were collected on palm pilot personal digital assistants (PDAs). The PDAs signaled the participants randomly eight times a day (between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.) for 1 week to complete brief questionnaires. When prompted by the signal, the participants had 5 min to initiate responding. After this time window or upon completion of the questionnaire, the PDA would become inactive until the next signal. Each questionnaire took ∼2 min to complete.

The ESM questionnaire included items that inquired about the following domains: (1) affect in the moment, (2) appraisals about the self, (3) appraisals about others, (4) appraisals of the current situation, (5) social contact, and (6) social appraisals and functioning (see Table 1 for the English translation of the ESM items used in the present study). The social contact item (i.e., “Right now I am alone”) was answered dichotomously (yes/no), whereas the remaining items were answered using 7-point scales from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). Note that for the sake of aiding the interpretation of the results we have made a distinction between affective states and cognitive appraisals; however, we recognize that such a distinction is not clear-cut and that affect and cognition are complexly intertwined processes. Likewise, we grouped appraisals as pertaining to the self, others, or the situation. This distinction is somewhat artificial but useful for organizing the presentation of the data. Note that, unlike most previous studies, the label “appraisals about others” does not refer to participants’ ratings of interaction partners, but to the manner in which participants’ experience others’ motives, actions, or esteem toward them.

TABLE 1. Direct effects of attachment style on daily life experiences.

Statistical Method

Experience sampling methodology data have a hierarchical structure in which daily life ratings (level 1 data) are nested within participants (level 2 data). Multilevel or hierarchical linear modeling techniques are a standard approach for the analysis of ESM data ( Nezlek, 2001 ; Bolger and Laurenceau, 2013 ). The multilevel analyses examined two types of relations between the attachment groups and daily life experiences. First, we assessed the independent effects of level 2 predictors (attachment style groups) on level 1 dependent measures (ESM ratings in daily life). Second, cross-level interactions (or slopes-as-outcomes) examined whether level 1 relationships (e.g., closeness and negative affect in the moment) varied as a function of level 2 variables (attachment groups). The analyses were conducted with Mplus 6 ( Muthén and Muthén, 1998–2010 ). To examine the effects of attachment, the analyses included two dummy-coded attachment style variables that were entered simultaneously as the level 2 predictors, following Cohen et al. (2003) . The first dummy code contrasted the anxious and secure attachment groups, and the second contrasted the avoidant and secure attachment groups. The secure attachment group was coded 0 in both codings. Note that direct comparisons of the anxious and avoidant attachment groups were not made, given that our hypotheses focused on differences between secure and insecure attachment. Level 1 predictors were group-mean centered ( Enders and Tofighi, 2007 ). The data departed from normality in some cases, so parameter estimates were calculated using maximum likelihood estimation with robust SEs.

Based upon the ASI, 119 (57.8%) of the participants were categorized as having secure attachment, 46 (22.3%) as having anxious attachment, and 41 (19.9%) as having avoidant attachment. These percentages are comparable to those reported in previous studies using the ASI in non-clinical samples (e.g., Conde et al., 2011 ; Oskis et al., 2013 ). The attachment groups did not differ in terms of age or sex. Participants completed an average of 40.8 usable ESM questionnaires ( SD = 9.1). The attachment groups did not differ on the mean number of usable questionnaires (Secure = 40.8, SD = 8.2; Anxious = 40.5, SD = 9.8; Avoidant = 41.1, SD = 10.9).

Expression of Attachment Styles in Daily Life

Table 1 presents the direct effects of attachment on daily life experiences. Compared to participants with a secure attachment, those with an anxious attachment reported higher negative affect, lower positive affect, as well as greater fear of losing control in daily life. As expected, the avoidant and secure groups did not differ in their ratings of negative affect, but avoidant participants reported feeling less happy than their secure counterparts. In addition to comparing the attachment groups on the experience of mean levels of affect in daily life, we also compared the groups on variance of affect using one-way ANOVAs. Note that this was not nested data because each participant had a single (within-person) variance score based upon their own distribution of happiness or negative affect. The ANOVA was significant for negative affect variance, F (2,203) = 5.58, p < 0.01. Post-hoc comparisons using Dunnett’s t -test indicated that the anxious attachment group exceeded the secure attachment group, p < 0.01. The avoidant and secure attachment groups did not differ. The ANOVA for happiness variance was not significant, F (2,203) = 0.48.

The attachment styles were also differentiated by their appraisals of the self, others, and the situation. Relative to both insecure groups, secure individuals endorsed more positive views on all items tapping appraisals about the self. That is, both anxious and avoidant participants perceived themselves in a more negative manner and were less confident in their coping capacities. Consistent with our hypotheses, individuals with an anxious or avoidant style reported feeling less cared for by others than did those with a secure attachment. Participants with an anxious style also differed from their secure peers in that they felt more suspicious and mistreated in the moment. In terms of appraisals about the situation, compared to secure attachment, anxious attachment was associated with expressing decreased enjoyment and competence regarding current activities, as well as with reports that the current situation was less positive and more stressful. Avoidant participants perceived their immediate situation as less positive, but not as more stressful, than secure participants.

Regarding social appraisals and functioning, the attachment groups did not differ in terms of how often they were with other people at the time of the signal (on average, secure participants were alone 42.6% of the time, anxious participants 41.9% of the time, and avoidant participants 48.1% of the time). Participants with a secure style reported greater feelings of closeness than did those with an anxious or avoidant style. As expected, anxiously attached individuals were more likely than secure ones to report that they were alone because others did not want to be with them (i.e., perceived social rejection). Moreover, as compared with secure individuals, those with an avoidant attachment showed a decreased desire to be with others when alone, and an increased preference to be alone when with others. Unexpectedly, compared with the secure group, the anxious group also displayed a higher preference for being alone when with others.

Moderating Effects of Attachment Style on the Association of Social Context with Daily Life Experiences

Two sets of cross-level interaction analyses were conducted to examine the extent to which participants’ social context impacted the expression of attachment styles in daily life. Specifically, we examined whether attachment styles moderated the association of social contact (alone = 1; with others = 2) and social closeness when with others (“I feel close to this person [people]”; ranging from 1 to 7) with measures of affect, appraisals, and functioning in the moment (Table 2 ). Overall, the report of being with other people at the time of the signal was significantly associated with experiencing greater happiness, decreased negative affect, having more positive self-appraisals, feeling more cared for by others, as well as with viewing one’s situation more positively. However, these associations were not moderated by attachment style, indicating that the impact of social contact on daily life experiences was not differentially expressed for the attachment groups.

TABLE 2. Cross-level interactions of social contact and social closeness with daily life experiences.

The closeness of social contacts in the moment was also associated with the momentary experience of affect, appraisals, and functioning. However, in contrast to social contact, the effects of social closeness on daily life experiences were significantly moderated by attachment style. When in the presence of people they did not feel close to, anxious participants reported more negative and less positive experiences than did those with a secure attachment. Specifically, as closeness diminished, anxious individuals experienced greater decreases in happiness and increased negative affect (Figure 1 ), appraised their current situation as less positive and more stressful (Figure 2 ), experienced greater decreases in their ability to cope, and reported a stronger preference for being alone than their securely attached peers. Cross-level analyses also revealed that as closeness diminished, avoidant participants felt less cared for by others than did those with a secure attachment (Figure 3 ).

FIGURE 1. Cross-level interaction of attachment style with social closeness and affective experiences in daily life .

FIGURE 2. Cross-level interaction of attachment style with social closeness and situation appraisals in daily life .

FIGURE 3. Cross-level interaction of attachment style with social closeness and feeling cared for by others in daily life .

To our knowledge, the current study is the first to examine how adult attachment styles, as measured by interview, are expressed in daily life using ESM in a sample of non-clinical young adults. As hypothesized, we found that participants’ momentary affective states, cognitive appraisals, and social functioning varied in meaningful ways as a function of their attachment style. These results support the construct and ecological validity of the ASI as a sensitive measure of attachment styles. Furthermore, they extend previous research by demonstrating that the effects of attachment style on daily life experiences are manifested across a variety of contexts and are not limited to interactional settings. In addition, the present study investigated the impact of the social context on the expression of attachment styles in the moment. The findings indicated that insecure individuals are especially reactive to the subjective nature of social contacts in their everyday life, not simply to the impact of whether they are alone or with others.

Attachment Strategies in Daily Life

Overall, the results regarding the daily life expression of attachment styles confirmed our theory-based predictions. Relative to both anxious and avoidant participants, those holding a secure style reported greater feelings of happiness, more positive self-appraisals, viewed their current situation more positively, felt more cared for by others, and felt closer to the people they were with. These findings are consistent with previous work showing that secure attachment is associated with a sense of self-efficacy, optimistic appraisals toward life in general, as well as positive interpersonal attitudes ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 , 2008 ). Moreover, the pattern of positive momentary experiences reported by secure, as compared to insecure, participants supports the notion that attachment security allows individuals to engage with their environment in a way that fosters psychological and relational benefits ( Siegel, 2012 ).

In the present study, the most pronounced differences emerged between the secure and anxious attachment groups. These differences showed that the daily experiences of individuals with an anxious style were consistent with the use of hyperactivating strategies. That is, compared with their secure peers, anxious participants approached their daily person-environment transactions with amplification of distress (e.g., higher negative affect, greater fear of losing control, higher subjective stress), decreased positive affect, and greater variability in the experience of negative affect. These results support Mikulincer and Shaver ’s ( 2003 , p. 109) characterization of anxiously attached people as possessing a “chaotic emotional architecture” that contributes to the dysregulation of negative affect. We also found that anxiously attached participants endorsed more negative and less positive appraisals about themselves and their current situation than their secure counterparts, which supports the negative effects of hyperactivating strategies on people’s cognitive appraisals. Moreover, relative to secure participants, anxious ones felt less cared for by others, less close to the people they were with, more suspicious, more mistreated, and, when alone, were more likely to hold attributions of not being wanted. This pattern of findings provides strong empirical evidence that the appraisals that anxious individuals make in the realm of daily life are characterized by a hypervigilance to interpersonal sources of threat and hypersensitivity toward rejection. The results also revealed that when anxiously attached participants were with others, they displayed a stronger preference for being alone than their secure peers. Although this finding was not expected, the cross-level interactions seem to suggest that this is driven by a heightened discomfort that arises when anxious individuals are in the presence of people with whom they do not feel close.

In regards to avoidantly attached participants, the results showed that their daily life experiences were consistent with the reliance on deactivating strategies. As predicted, compared with secure subjects, avoidant ones endorsed a stronger preference for being alone when with others and a decreased desire to be with others when alone. Additionally, relative to their secure peers, they tended to approach their person-environment transactions with decreased happiness and less positive views of their situation, but not with amplification of negative states. Avoidant participants also felt less cared for by others and less close to the people they were with than did secure participants. This is consistent with their psychological barriers toward closeness and possibly indicates that their lack of involvement in relationships that elicit closeness and care may reinforce their underlying models in a self-perpetuating manner. Avoidant individuals also reported more negative views of themselves than did those with a secure attachment. Although avoidantly attached people have often been conceptualized as holding a positive self-model ( Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991 ), research suggests that their positive views of themselves reflect defensive processes of self-inflation ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007 ). It could be that when asked to report on their experiences in the moment, avoidant individuals are less capable of suppressing the vulnerable nature of their sense of self. Indeed, it has been posited that ESM assessments allow less room for people to resort to self-interpretation or use mental heuristics when reporting on their self-perceptions ( Delespaul, 1995 ).

The Impact of Social Context on the Expression of Attachment Styles

Contrary to our initial expectation, the impact of social context on the expression of attachment styles in the moment was only observed for social closeness and not for social contact. This finding is important because it highlights a boundary condition of the effects of attachment style in social contexts — namely, that the manifestation of attachment styles depends on the subjective appraisal of the closeness of social contacts, rather than on the simple presence of social interactions. The finding that it is social appraisals, not simply social contact, that interacts with attachment is compatible with the description of attachment as a “person by situation” interactionist theory that at its core involves appraisal of the social context.

Increased levels of perceived closeness were associated with differential responses for anxious and avoidant individuals. Compared with the secure group, the affective states, situation appraisals, coping capacities, and social functioning of the anxious group worsened as closeness diminished; or, seen from the opposite perspective, improved as closeness increased. This pattern of results may be interpreted to suggest that when in the presence of people they do not feel close to, anxious people’s preoccupation with rejection and approval is amplified and this permeates their subjective experiences. By contrast, increased levels of closeness might enhance their momentary sense of felt-security and provide them with the self-validation they long for, which in turn could bring about an improvement in their subjective experiences. The finding that greater closeness seemed to aid anxious participants with the regulation of various self-states (e.g., affect, coping, stress) resonates with the work of Pietromonaco and Barrett (2006) , who, using a variant of the RIR, concluded that individuals holding a preoccupied attachment valued their interacting partners more when the interactions had provided help with self-regulatory processess.

The results also demonstrated that as closeness diminished avoidant subjects felt less cared for by others than their secure peers. Because avoidant individuals approach their interpersonal interactions in a way that minimizes the possibility of frustration (in order to keep their attachment system deactivated), it may be that experiencing closeness disconfirms their low expectations (e.g., about others’ responsiveness) and thus makes them more perceptive to the caring attitudes of others. Notably, the fact that greater closeness affected appraisal about others, but not their self-states, is in line with the contention that avoidantly attached people resort to autoregulation (i.e., they turn to themselves to regulate their internal states; Solomon and Tatkin, 2011 ). Additional research is required to elucidate the specific psychological mechanisms that make up the experience of momentary closeness and how it is associated with beneficial effects for insecurely attached individuals.

Specificity of Attachment Processes in Daily Life

The results of this study are relevant to the broader debate in the attachment field regarding the specificity of attachment-related processes in adulthood (see Tidwell et al., 1996 ; Pietromonaco and Barrett, 1997 ; Torquati and Raffaelli, 2004 ). On the one hand, the fact that attachment styles predicted individual’s subjective experiences across the range of situations they encountered during the week, and not only those that were interaction-based, suggests that attachment styles are relevant features of personality functioning that have pervasive effects on how individuals experience their inner and outer worlds. On the other hand, the findings that attachment styles moderated the effects of perceived social closeness on daily life experiences (but not the effects of mere social contact on these experiences) highlights the fact that attachment styles are differentially expressed under relational circumstances that might bring attachment concerns to the fore. Thus, we believe that a richer understanding of attachment dynamics will come from efforts that examine their expression at both the individual and relational level.

Limitations and Future Directions

Additional research is warranted to address the limitations of the present study. First, we used a sample of college students with predominantly female participants. Future studies would benefit from assessing the expression of attachment styles in community samples with a wider age range and a more representative distribution in terms of gender. Second, it should be noted that the cross-level interactions of the effects of social closeness on the expression of attachment styles were interpreted in line with theoretical propositions from the attachment literature; nevertheless, given the correlational nature of these data, the opposite interpretation is also plausible (e.g., less coping capacity contributing to lower perceived closeness). Third, note that the attachment groups showed a broader pattern of significant results on the direct effects than the interactions. This likely demonstrates the robust nature of the direct effects and the fact that the interactions are computed over-and-above the direct effects. Thus, we want to be careful not to over-interpret the cross-level interaction effects. Nevertheless, we believe that the pattern of findings for the cross-level interactions indicates that anxious attachment (relative to secure attachment) is reactive to the nature of social contact, not simply any social contact; whereas avoidant attachment generally is not characterized by strong reactivity to social context (as measured in the current study). Fourth, this study focused exclusively on momentary appraisals of social closeness. Further research could expand upon the current findings by assessing the effects of variations in trait social closeness (e.g., Moore et al., 2014 ). Finally, it would also be important for future work to assess the extent to which our findings are generalizable across different cultures. Given that we found theoretically expected daily life correlates of attachment styles in a Spanish sample, the results would seem to fit with the notion that attachment strategies are universal characteristics ( van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz, 2008 ; van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2010 ). However, studies in different cultures are needed to establish the cross-cultural ecological validity of attachment styles.

The extent to which attachment style differences are expressed in real time as individuals navigate their real-life settings has remained an area largely untapped by research in the attachment field. The present investigation provided a novel contribution by using an interview-based measure to assess adult attachment styles and by employing a random time-sampling procedure that demonstrated that the hallmark features of secure, anxious, and avoidant individuals are reflected in their day-to-day person-environment transactions. The current study further extends the validity of the attachment style construct to the realm of everyday life and, moreover, points to the utility of employing ESM for obtaining a more finely grained understanding of how the predictions derived from attachment theory play out in the natural flow of real life.

Author Contributions

TS contributed to study design, data collection, data management, and writing of the manuscript. TK contributed to study conception, study design, data analyses, and writing of the manuscript. SB contributed to data collection and critically revised the manuscript. MM contributed to data collection and critically revised the manuscript. CC contributed to data analyses and critically revised the manuscript. PS contributed to study design, provided input regarding data analyses, and critically revised the manuscript. NB-V was the principal investigator, conceived the study and contributed to study design, data collection, and writing of the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Plan Nacional de I+D PSI2011-30321-C02-01), Fundació La Marató de TV3 (091110), and Generalitat de Catalunya (Suport als Grups de Recerca 2014SGR1070). NB-V is supported by the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) Academia Award. We thank Agnès Ros-Morente and Erika Bedoya for their assistance with data collection and management.

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Keywords : adult attachment, Attachment Style Interview, experience sampling, ecological validity, individual differences

Citation: Sheinbaum T, Kwapil TR, Ballespí S, Mitjavila M, Chun CA, Silvia PJ and Barrantes-Vidal N (2015) Attachment style predicts affect, cognitive appraisals, and social functioning in daily life. Front. Psychol. 6:296. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00296

Received: 17 November 2014; Accepted: 02 March 2015; Published online: 18 March 2015

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2015 Sheinbaum, Kwapil, Ballespí, Mitjavila, Chun, Silvia and Barrantes-Vidal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Neus Barrantes-Vidal, Departament de Psicologia Clínica i de la Salut, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• Work + Money

Relationships

• Slow Living

How Learning My Attachment Style Changed Everything

The first time I reached out to a counselor about my friendships, I messaged him this: “My best friend tells me I don’t share things about my life. She says she feels like she doesn’t even know me. She’s right. I don’t share what’s happening with me that much. Why do you think I would do that?” 

His reply was, “Hmm, I don’t know. Just try sharing more often.” 

What revolutionary advice. I read the response and closed my phone, annoyed. 

Willing myself to “just try sharing more” seemed simple enough, but it didn’t answer my deeper question, “Why would I do this in the first place?”

“I was eager to know why I mindlessly withheld from relationships because I was beginning to realize it was hurting the people I love.”

My propensity to keep things to myself was one of the many pain points on my list of patterns I wanted to decipher when I reached out for help. I was eager to know why I mindlessly withheld from relationships because I was beginning to realize it was hurting the people I love. It was also keeping me from the closeness I wanted. 

I suppressed details of my life, both good and bad. If I’d been promoted at work, had a challenging day, or was dating someone new, I simply didn’t think to share it. Left out of the loop of my life, my friends began to assume I didn’t trust them to be a part of it, and voiced their pain. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I was determined to solve the puzzle of why I was the way I was. I just didn’t know where to begin to find the pieces. 

That was until one day when luck struck my YouTube feed. 

“Could something that happened to me so long ago be dictating how I act today?”

A video popped up that explained avoidant attachment styles, social behaviors often marked by withdrawal. I felt exposed and empowered in one fell swoop. For the first time, I heard my behavior accurately described and given an etiology that connected it to experiences in early life. But, could it really be so? Could something that happened to me so long ago be dictating how I act today?

I dove into research that detailed how the subconscious mind , the reservoir of our personal experiences going back to infancy and the compounded meaning they’ve taken on, determines 95–97% of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. That means, at most, what we consciously choose makes up only 5% of the picture of our life. 

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”  – Carl Jung

Unless we do the work to identify the submerged stories fueling the 95%, our subconscious will determine much of our lives for us. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung attests , “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” 

This was a watershed moment, shifting my view on how I could grow beyond my patterns and transform my life. 

Once I learned my tendency to avoid openness with my friends had a subconscious root, one that I could tug and unearth, I knew it was in my power to change long-term. This was bigger than breaking a habit. I had a way to trace the hidden paths to why I did what I did and tap it at its source.

Understanding this was essential to recognizing Attachment Theory for the tool it could be.

Attachment Theory originates from the combined work of psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth . It proposes that we are neurologically hardwired for how we view, give, and receive love within the first two years of our lives.

“Attachment Theory proposes that we are neurologically hardwired for how we view, give, and receive love within the first two years of our lives.”

The theory suggests our early experiences with our primary caregivers — how attuned they were to our needs, how consistently they met them, and how emotionally available they were — program our understanding of love and how much of it we can expect throughout life.

Our first lessons in human connection become what Bowlby coined as “internal working models,” influencing the attachment style we develop and carry on later in life.

Today, four main attachment styles are recognized by researchers. They are outlined by The Attachment Project here and I’ve summarized their traits below:

Secure  

Folks with this style are in tune with their feelings, communicate their needs, and have the tools to resolve conflicts without it threatening their sense of safety or autonomy. They likely grew up with an emotionally available caregiver who was consistently attuned to them and offered them space to express and work through their feelings without judgment.  

Avoidant (or Dismissive)

Individuals with an avoidant style keep loved ones at arm’s length emotionally and subconsciously associate intimacy with abandonment and pain, so they often sabotage or avoid it altogether. Kiddos that developed this style learned early on there was a limit to how open they could be with their feelings without it bringing shame or consequences. They were expected to meet the majority of their needs themselves. 

Anxious (or Preoccupied) 

The anxious bunch dives headlong into relationships and holds on for dear life. Growing up in a household where their caregiver may have been inconsistent or emotionally hot and cold, anxious-styled individuals take it upon themselves to keep a tight hold on love when they find it. They are hyper-aware of any signs of abandonment or rejection and do everything they can to prevent it, even to their detriment.

Disorganized (or Fearful-Avoidant)

Those with a disorganized style are often individuals who experienced extreme abuse in early childhood. This style develops “when ​​the child’s caregivers – the only source of safety – become a source of fear,” according to the Attachment Project . As adults, they struggle to feel safe in relationships and emotionally trust others, and their behavior is often an unpredictable mixture of both anxious and avoidant tendencies. 

We all exist somewhere on the spectrum of attachment. While I already had a hunch that I was avoidant, I took a test to confirm where I fell.

Our styles can fluctuate, but they play a heavier hand in how we approach each other in relationships than we might realize. 

Consider this analogy from Thais Gibson , founder of The Personal Development School . 

“When two adults, each with their own attachment style, come together in a relationship of any kind, they have their own individual set of expectations for the connection.”

When two adults, each with their own attachment style, come together in a relationship of any kind, they have their own individual set of expectations for the connection. According to Gibson , it’s like sitting down to play a board game together, but one person has the rules for Scrabble, and the other has the rules for Monopoly. As the game unfolds, neither parties are aware of the separate set of rules the other is playing with. All they see is the other person not playing by theirs. This mismatch of unspoken expectations creates unnecessary friction, disappointment, and miscommunication in the relationship.

My tendency to under-share was an automatic rule in how I engaged my friends, but with the roadmap of Attachment Theory, I learned where it came from and gained a tool to help me address it. It didn’t have to be an ongoing pattern I would always succumb to.

And that’s where Attachment Theory empowers us: Our styles are not permanent. We can move the needle towards secure attachment by using the theory like a fishing line, pulling up underlying motivations to understand their origin and replacing those patterns with new beliefs.

“Once I understood what subconscious stories were informing this narrative, I worked to uproot and replace those beliefs.”

Tracing the root of my chronic privacy in relationships, I boiled it down to the fact that I subconsciously believed I could avoid rejection by keeping things to myself and not expecting anyone to care. Because of my avoidant programming, I learned early on to assume people were too busy to be there for me, so I lessened my need for them entirely to sidestep that pain. 

Once I understood what subconscious stories were informing this narrative, I worked to uproot and replace those beliefs. I volunteered details about my life to my friends in a way I hadn’t before. It felt unnatural because, for me, it was — even scary and vulnerable sometimes. But in doing so, I allowed the evidence of my friends’ love and attention in return to reinforce these new neuropathways I was creating: My friends see me. They’re not too busy to care. They want to know about my life. 

Learning my style helped me realize my inability to break habits before wasn’t because I was defective, lacked willpower, or simply didn’t love my friends enough. It was because the driving force of 95% of this behavior came from my subconscious beliefs, and I had to go beneath the surface to identify them. 

It’s no quick fix. It’s exposing and humbling work that a professional’s guidance can significantly aid. Still, by learning our attachment styles, we can lay its blueprint over our unconscious behaviors, helping us navigate our beautifully complex minds and stories.

“It’s no quick fix. It’s exposing and humbling work that a professional’s guidance can significantly aid.”

I recently sat at my friend’s kitchen table as she boiled us potatoes for dinner. I’d had an overwhelming week, sorting through mountains of self-doubt and fear, and I was struggling. She asked, “So, how are you?” Previously, my instinct was to glaze over the details and transition the conversation to focus on her as quickly as possible.

But this time, I didn’t. 

I recognized how my urge to avoid and withhold bubbled up at her question. But I also recognized the opportunity to move the needle a fraction more towards security, letting the love of my friend slowly teach my subconscious mind that I’m safe in expressing my emotions, the details of my life are worth sharing, and she’s not too busy to care about them. 

So I took a breath and chose not to run from the tension. I opened up a little bit more, and the needle moved.

Cheyanne Solis  is a writer from California. When she’s not planning weddings or acting like a grandpa by bird-watching in the park with a copy of the Sunday Times, she is falling into fascination about the human experience, working to write words to wrap around it all.

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Adult Attachment Styles: Definitions and Impact on Relationships

Westend61 / Getty Images

• Archaeology

• Ph.D., Psychology, Fielding Graduate University
• M.A., Psychology, Fielding Graduate University
• B.A., Film Studies, Cornell University

Attachment is a deep emotional bond between two people. The idea was pioneered by John Bowlby, but his attachment theory , as well as Mary Ainsworth’s ideas about attachment styles, mostly focused on the relationship between an infant and an adult caregiver. Since Bowlby introduced the concept, psychologists have extended attachment research into adulthood. This research has led to the specification of four adult attachment styles among other findings.

Key Takeaways: Adult Attachment Styles

• John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth were the first researchers to study attachment, the close bonds that develop between two people. They investigated attachment in infancy, but the research has since been extended to attachment in adulthood.
• Adult attachment styles develop along two dimensions: attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance.
• There are four adult attachment styles: secure, anxious preoccupied, dismissive avoidant, and fearful avoidant. However, most researchers today don’t categorize people into one of these attachment styles, instead preferring to measure attachment along the continuums of anxiety and avoidance.
• Many assume there is stability in attachment style throughout the lifespan, however, this question is still unresolved and requires further research.

Adult Attachment Styles

While John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s pioneering work focused on the development of infant attachments, Bowlby suggested that attachment impacts human experience throughout the lifespan . The research on adult attachment has demonstrated that some, but not all, adult relationships function like attachment relationships. As a result, adults exhibit individual differences in attachment relationships just like young children do.

Research on adult attachment styles has shown that there are two dimensions on which these styles develop. One dimension is attachment-related anxiety. Those who are high on this dimension are more insecure and worried about their relationship partner’s availability and attentiveness. The other dimension is attachment-related avoidance. Those who are high on this dimension have difficulty opening up and being vulnerable with significant others. Interestingly, recent research into child attachment patterns have also discovered that like adults, children’s attachment styles tend to vary along the dimensions of anxiety and avoidance, demonstrating that attachment styles at different ages are based on similar factors.

These two dimensions give rise to the following four adult attachment styles :

Secure Attachment

Those who have a secure attachment style score low on both anxiety and avoidance. They trust that those they have close relationships with will be there to offer support and security when needed and are prepared to offer security and support when their partners need it in return. They find it easy to open up in relationships and are good at articulating what they want and need from their partners. They’re confident and optimistic about their relationships and tend to find them stable and satisfying.

Anxious Preoccupied Attachment

Those with an anxious preoccupied attachment style are high on the anxiety dimension but low on the avoidance dimension. These individuals have difficulty trusting their partners’ commitment to them. Because they are more pessimistic and worried about their relationships, they often need reassurance from their partners and will create or overemphasize conflicts. They may also have issues with jealousy. As a result, their relationships are often tumultuous.

Dismissive Avoidant Attachment

Those with a dismissive avoidant attachment style are low on the anxiety dimension but high on the avoidance dimension. People with this kind of attachment style are often aloof and emotionally distant in relationships. They may claim they fear commitment. These individuals may seek to assert their independence by delving into individual activities like work, hobbies, or social activities that don’t involve their significant others. They may come across as focused only on themselves and may have passive aggressive tendencies.

Fearful Avoidant Attachment

Those with a fearful avoidant attachment style are high in both anxiety and avoidance. These individuals both fear and desire intimate relationships. On the one hand, they want the support and security that comes from having a significant other. On the other, they worry their significant other will hurt them and at other times feel stifled by the relationship. As a result, people with a fearful avoidant attachment style can be inconsistent towards their partners from day to day, and their ambivalent attitude can lead to chaos.

While these categories are helpful in describing the extremes on the dimensions of anxiety and avoidance, due to recent research on adult attachment, scholars tend to measure individual differences in attachment along the continuum of each dimension . As a result, adult attachment styles are measured by the degree of anxiety and avoidance each individual scores, providing a more nuanced picture of attachment style than if an individual were simply placed into one of the above four attachment style categories.

Studying Adult Attachment Styles

Studies on adult attachments have generally focused on two different types of relationships . Developmental psychologists have investigated how parents’ adult attachment styles influence their children’s attachment styles. Meanwhile, social and personality psychologists have examined attachment styles within the context of close adult relationships, especially romantic relationships.

Impact of Attachment Styles on Parenting

In the mid-1980s, Mary Main and her colleagues created the Adult Attachment Interview , which uses an adults’ memories of their experiences with their parents as children to categorize them into one of four attachment styles similar to those outlined above. Main then examined the attachment styles of her adult participants’ children and found that adults who were securely attached had securely attached children. Meanwhile, those with the three insecure attachment styles have children who also have a similar insecure attachment style. In another study, pregnant women were given the Adult Attachment Interview. Their children were then tested for attachment style at 12 months old. Like the first study, this research demonstrated that the mothers’ attachment styles corresponded to those of their babies'.

Impact of Attachment Styles on Romantic Relationships

Research has demonstrated that attachment in adult romantic relationships functions similarly to attachment in infant-caregiver relationships. Although adults don’t have the same needs as children, studies have shown that adults with secure attachment look to their partners for support when they’re upset, just as secure infants look to their caregivers. Research has also demonstrated that although adults with a fearful avoidant attachment style may act defensive, they are still emotionally aroused by conflicts with their significant other. On the other hand, people with dismissive avoidant attachment can suppress their emotions towards a significant other. In this sense, avoidance acts as a defense mechanism that helps the individual alleviate the pain brought about by relationship difficulties.

Impact of Attachment Styles on Social Behavior

Studies have indicated that everyday social behavior is informed by one’s attachment style, as well. Securely attached individuals tend to have positive social interactions on a regular basis. In contrast, those with an anxious preoccupied attachment style experience a mix of positive and negative daily social interactions, which may reinforce both their desire for and distrust of relationships. Furthermore, those with a dismissive avoidant attachment style tend to have more negative than positive social interactions in their daily lives, and in general, experience less intimacy and enjoyment in social situations. This lack of enjoyment could be one reason people with dismissive avoidant attachment often keep others at arm's length.

Can Attachment Styles Change?           

Scholars generally agree that attachment styles in childhood influence attachment styles in adulthood , however the degree of consistency is likely only modest. In fact, in adulthood, one may experience different attachment styles with different people in their lives. For example, one study showed that there was only a small to moderate association between one’s current attachment style with a parental figure and their attachment style with a current romantic partner. Yet, some research findings indicate that attachment styles are reinforced because people choose to have relationships with those who confirm their beliefs about close connections.

Thus, the question of stability and change in individual attachment styles is unresolved. Different studies have provided different evidence depending on the way attachment is conceptualized and measured. Many psychologists assume there is long-term stability in attachment style, especially in adulthood, but it is still an open question that requires further research.

• Fraley, R. Chris. “Adult Attachment Theory and Research: A Brief Overview.” 2018. http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
• Fraley, R. Chris and Phillip R. Shaver. “Attachment Theory and Its Place in Contemporary Personality Theory and Research.” Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 3rd ed., edited by Oliver P. John, Richard W. Robins, and Lawrence A. Pervin, The Guilford Press, 2008, pp. 518-541.
• McAdams, Dan. The Person: An Introduction to the Science of Personality Psychology . 5th ed., Wiley, 2008.
• “What Are The Four Attachment Styles?” Better Help . 28 October, 2019. https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/attachment/what-are-the-four-attachment-styles/
• Understanding Fearful Avoidant Attachment Style
• What Is Attachment Theory? Definition and Stages
• What Is Mindfulness in Psychology?
• Understanding the Big Five Personality Traits
• What Is Identity Diffusion? Definition and Examples
• Myers-Briggs Personality Types: Definitions and Examples
• What Is Flirting? A Psychological Explanation
• The Concept of "Other" in Sociology
• What Is Socioemotional Selectivity Theory?
• Oedipus Complex
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Explained
• Proxemics, the Study of Personal Space
• What Is Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)?
• Psychodynamic Theory: Approaches and Proponents
• What Is Positive Psychology?
• Definition and Examples of Language-Style Matching

Swinging With Attachment Styles

How to talk to a partner about being consensually non-monogamous..

Posted April 18, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• What Is Attachment?
• Find counselling to strengthen relationships
• Attachment styles predict attitudes toward, and willingness to engage in, consensual non-monogamy (CNM).
• Higher attachment avoidance, but not anxiety, is related to more positive attitudes and openness to CNM.
• Predicting your partner's reactions might help you avoid emotional pain and preserve your relationship.

Whether it is fear of missing out, sexual boredom , or an innate pull toward polyamory , couples are increasingly considering consensual non- monogamy (CNM) as a lifestyle choice. This choice likely includes weighing values, societal judgments, family systems, emotional tolerance levels, and trust. Taking a value-neutral position, this post is intended to help readers evaluate the balance among rational choice, emotional tolerance, and trust in considering a CNM relationship.

A 2024 Match Singles in America report indicated that of those open to CNM relationships, 11 percent endorsed polyamory, 13 percent open relationships, 21 percent becoming monogamish, and 12 percent swinging, among other options. If you have never engaged in these types of relationships and are considering it, or if you are considering a new relationship partner who either claims or aspires to one of these forms of CNM, you might want to consider your attachment style. Similarly, if you have been in a monogamous relationship and either you or your partner have become interested in exploring some form of CNM, a clear discussion of each of your attachment styles is in order.

Attachment Styles

Attachment styles develop in childhood , remain relatively stable across adulthood, and have a powerful influence on how adults think, feel, and behave in relationships. Four primary adult styles are discussed in the adult attachment literature: secure, dismissing, preoccupied , and fearful.

• Secure. People with secure styles value relationships and are able to generally see and accept people for how they are—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Secure people do not typically overreact to social threats, are not prone to jealousy , are able to control their emotions, and use their emotions effectively in making decisions.
• Dismissing. People with this style learned early in life that their caregivers would not tolerate sad, needy, or vulnerable feelings and rarely talked about love or provided comfort. They adapt to this by ignoring rejection and denying the need for comfort, reassurance, or emotional intimacy . Because they do not feel a need for these things, they have a hard time seeing why other people would need them and struggle to provide these functions to romantic partners.
• Preoccupied. Those with preoccupied styles typically had parents who were unreliable and inconsistent. So, they learn to keep a close eye on their attachment figures—parents in childhood; romantic partners in adulthood—to make sure they will be available when needed for comfort and support. As adults, their hyperactivated style of looking for social threats makes them distrustful of romantic partner availability or consistency, so they often seek reassurance and are prone to very strong emotional experiences and distress if their relational security is threatened.
• Fearful. When people are raised by parents who are frightened or frightening, they will often develop this style. Chaotic early environments made it difficult for these people to develop a consistent dismissing or preoccupied style. So, they use a mixture of both styles but enact them in a haphazard and unpredictable manner that leads to a disorganized and dysregulated emotional system. Because of their early life experiences, they may expect to be hurt or wounded by their romantic partners.

Despite societal stigmatization, many people engaged in CNM relationships report a high level of relationship satisfaction with common processes of communication, honesty, negotiation, and consensus. These processes are like those typically found in secure attachment, which may be important for the successful realization of CNM relationships (see Moore et al., 2015 for review).

For those who have never engaged in CNM but might be considering it, Moore and her colleagues (2015) found that those with higher levels of attachment avoidance had more positive attitudes toward and willingness to engage in CNM (although they still generally prefer monogamous relationships). These researchers hypothesized that “avoidant individuals may prefer CNM relationships because these relationships allow them to dilute emotional closeness with one partner by investing less across multiple partners.” Ka, Bottcher, and Walker (2020) came up with nearly identical results in their 2020 study, with higher levels of avoidance relating to more positive attitudes and willingness to engage in CNM relationships.

In Moore et al.’s and Ka et al.’s studies, higher levels of attachment anxiety (underlying preoccupied attachment) were not related to positive attitudes or willingness to engage in CNM.

A pattern that is often seen with couples in therapy is that a more avoidant partner in an initially monogamous relationship either has a history of, or interest in, CNM relationships and seeks the cooperation and/or participation of the preoccupied partner to tolerate or participate in CNM themselves (e.g., swinging).

This arrangement requires a great deal of trust and discussion of motives and the difference between rational decision-making and emotional tolerance. First, the more anxious/preoccupied person will want to know if you really like/love them and may have a hard time understanding how (in their mind) they are not enough for you. They are also likely to need to understand how you could be depended on as a relationship partner if you desire sexual contact with others. You will want to clearly think out the answer to this question in advance so you can clearly articulate how and in what ways you will be a loving and supportive partner who can, at least partially, meet their relationship needs.

If the more anxious/preoccupied partner is convinced that a CNM relationship makes rational sense, it will be important to ask them to take stock of their own jealousies and emotional tolerances. The rational brain and the emotional brain have some overlap but are in different areas that do not always talk to each other that well. It could be expected that a preoccupied person might agree in principle to a CNM arrangement only to find that once this arrangement is initiated they feel jealous, shameful (particularly if they did not really want to have sex with another but did it to please you), and flooded by negative emotion . Emotional reasoning might make them feel betrayed (even if they agreed to it) by you, deeply wounded, and unable to continue in the relationship.

If you think that a CNM relationship is for you:

• Take your time introducing the idea and getting used to it.
• Know your own and your partner’s attachment styles.
• Consider both your and tour patrner's short-term and long-term reactions.
• Consider the likely emotional reactions separately from conscious/rational thoughts.
• Think about your end game: As your relationship matures, how do you envision it all ending?

Conley, T. D., & Piemonte, J. L. (2021). Are there “Better” and “Worse” Ways to be Consensually Non-Monogamous (CNM)?: CNM Types and CNM-Specific Predictors of Dyadic Adjustment. Archives of Sexual Behavior: The Official Publication of the International Academy of Sex Research , 50 (4), 1273–1286. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02027-3

Moors, A. C., Conley, T. D., Edelstein, R. S., & Chopik, W. J. (2015). Attached to monogamy? Avoidance predicts willingness to engage (but not actual engagement) in consensual non-monogamy. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships , 32 (2), 222–240. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407514529065

Ka, W. L., Bottcher, S., & Walker, B. R. (2022). Attitudes toward consensual non-monogamy predicted by sociosexual behavior and avoidant attachment. Current Psychology , 41 (7), 4312–4320. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00941-8

Hal Shorey, Ph.D. , is a licensed psychologist specializing in helping people understand and change how their personalities and the ways they process emotions influence their adult relationships.

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The Attachment Styles Development Essay

It appears useful and interesting to investigate one’s way of building relationships with other people. The internal working model represents a helpful instrument to indicate the relationship patterns as it suggests that each individual operates with a specific template of relationships that reflects their childhood experiences (Fraley & Roisman 2019). The internal working model is based on attachment styles on which one relies. Attachment style can be defined as a set of “knowledge, expectations, and insecurities” people hold regarding themselves and their relationships (Fraley & Roisman 2019, p. 26). There are four main attachment styles: secure, fearful-avoidant, dismissing-avoidant, and preoccupied.

According to Fraley & Roisman, the adult attachment style is less malleable compared to a child attachment style (2019). While children can develop new patterns of interactions more easily, adults significantly depend on the developed approach to the relationships. Additionally, there is a difference between a child-caregiver relationship and an adult romantic relationship. While an infant’s attachment to a parent serves for fundamental socialization, attachment in the adult relationship is less important. Mainly, adults in romantic relationships appear as independent individuals, and attachment informs their compatibility.

Speaking of my attachment style, avoidance is significantly present in it, as well as fearfulness. Therefore, the fearful-avoidant model dominates my internal working model, especially in close relationships. Although I am somewhat extroverted and like socializing, I might feel insecure in intimate relationships. While such an attachment style may hinder trustworthy romantic relationships, it induces a sense of independence and self-sufficiency, which helps me to accomplish my goals by relying on myself.

Finally, when reading Fraley & Roisman (2019), I found it exciting and hopeful that the foundations of attachment do not fully define one’s approach to relationships and the success of socialization. I thought people should “match” their attachment styles to build successful relationships. However, after studying this unit, I realized that relationship success depends on one’s flexibility and willingness to make the commonplace rather than on particular patterns. At the same time, it is helpful to learn one’s attachment patterns to conquer insecurities.

Fraley, R. C., & Roisman, G. I. (2019). The development of adult attachment styles: Four lessons . Current Opinion in Psychology , 25 , 26–30. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 17). The Attachment Styles Development. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-attachment-styles-development/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "The Attachment Styles Development." December 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-attachment-styles-development/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Attachment Styles Development." December 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-attachment-styles-development/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Attachment Styles Development." December 17, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-attachment-styles-development/.

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How Attachment Style Shapes Our Choices

Y our attachment style and degree of individuation determine your partnership choices and relationship satisfaction. The process of individuation—becoming an individual—allows you to meet your needs for both attachment and autonomy necessary for healthy relationships.

It starts in the first year of life, as we learn that we’re separate from our mother and that we and other people each have our own thoughts, feelings, needs, perceptions, and boundaries.

Margaret Mahler studied mother-child dyads and identified how we separate from our earliest caregivers and develop autonomy and identity to become an individual. This allows us to develop our true self.

Mahler concluded that separation-individuation depends on continued attachment to a responsive caregiver. This allows a child to develop a stable sense of self and others by integrating fluctuating internal states and frustrating and pleasurable aspects of another person.

Whereas Mahler studied the task of separating, John Bowlby developed attachment theory, also based on early child development, but which focused on how attachment defines our sense of self and others. The two theories overlap, and attachment is affected when we have difficulty differentiating from our first caretaker. Both Bowlby and Mahler agreed that a mother’s consistent and understanding attitude is critical for child development.[1]

As we grow, other people at home become important and impact our sense of security, self-esteem, and later adult relationships. Autonomy is best achieved when separation from our parents is conflict-free and they’re seen as supportive and nurturing.

Object Constancy and Splitting

To separate from our mother (or earliest caretaker), as infants we must make sense of contradictory feelings of love and hatred toward her and develop a cohesive view (“object constancy”) of ourselves and others, meaning that we internalize a steady image of ourselves and our mother. When parenting is deficient and we’re unable to integrate good and bad feelings and aspects of our mother, the result is called splitting, first coined by Freud. Splitting keeps the “good” and loved aspects of our mother separate from the “bad” and hated aspects of her, we mentally split the good and bad mother into two contrary representations.[2] This impairs object constancy and our ability to fully develop autonomy. It creates turmoil in close relationships and is associated with an anxious attachment style and fears of abandonment. [3] Read more about how splitting affects relationships.

Attachment Styles

Attachment theory claims that daily interactions with our earliest caretaker determine our style of attaching and how we relate to other people. When not parented well, lack of object constancy might produce a defensive detachment style, l ow self-esteem , and pseudo-self-sufficiency to compensate for a lack of real connection.[4] In some cases, a child may develop narcissism or borderline personality disorder .

We’re likely to seek a partner who conforms to our internal models and reflects how we see ourselves and others.[5] Although not fully explained by research, some people with dysfunctional early parenting develop secure attachments later in life. Temperament also influences how babies behave in ways that appear unrelated to caregiving or are different from siblings who share the same parents.[6]

The three basic attachment styles include secure, anxious, and avoidant; the last has two variants: fearful and dismissive. Estimates suggest roughly 50 percent of the population is secure, 20 percent is anxious, 25 percent is avoidant, and 5 percent is fearful.[7]

Secure Attachment

A responsive caretaker in our earliest years helps us traverse the individuation-separation process with a secure attachment, healthy self-esteem, and the capacity for autonomy and intimacy.[8] This enables us to deal with separations and object constancy. Secure attachers see themselves and others in a positive light and anticipate that they’re reliable, available, and trustworthy. Thus, they believe that it’s easy for them to be in intimate relationships and depend upon other people. They don’t split or idealize their partners but see them as “whole” persons with positive and negative traits. They seek a comfortable rather than intense relationship. They’re compassionate and responsive to their partner’s communications and needs without reacting to requests for more space or intimacy.

Anxious Attachment

People with an anxious attachment style (also called preoccupied) are hyper-focused on the relationship. If their mother was emotionally unavailable or inconsistent, they might worry about rejection and abandonment, just like as a baby they were preoccupied with her mother’s lack of responsiveness and/or comings and goings. This insecurity sensitizes them to signs of withdrawal or abandonment and makes them question their partner’s feelings and commitment.

People with an anxious attachment style view others positively but believe themselves to be unworthy and unlovable (most codependents). They’ve internalized their early caretaker’s behavior as shaming, inferring that they’re not good enough, lovable, or worthy. Their self-esteem suffers as a result.

They’re uncomfortable and feel less valued being on their own, but believe that relationships will validate their lovability and provide the acceptance that they lack internally. Separations are often fraught with guilt, resentment , and anxiety .[9] In relationships, they’re dependent, insecure, and needy, and want complete closeness. Since relationships reflect self-assessments, their strategy usually doesn’t work, because anxious attachers often bond with someone avoidant whose attachment style matches that of their parent and childhood experience. This only exacerbates their experience of abandonment and reinforces their dependency and low self-esteem. It perpetuates a vicious cycle of emotional abandonment.

Avoidant Attachment

An avoidant attachment style evolves when a mother is frequently unresponsive or emotionally unavailable . Her child learns to be self-sufficient and suppresses vulnerable feelings and attachment needs for love and closeness. Those feelings and needs felt unsafe and were experienced as shameful or disappointing. Such a cold mother may also have had this style and expected her child to be independent before it was emotionally mature enough to do so. (See Sons and Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.)

People who suffered abuse or neglect often develop a fearful attachment style , also known as disorganized. When children fear their mother, they may develop a fearful-avoidant attachment style that has elements of both anxious and avoidant attachment. Like anxious attachers, they see themselves as unworthy and unlovable and want a close relationship, but fear abandonment. However, because they see other people as unavailable, untrustworthy, and rejecting, they’re afraid of becoming dependent and getting hurt. So they avoid relationships to be safe.

Individuals with a dismissive-avoidant style achieve autonomy and have a positive view of themselves. They prefer their independence, avoid closeness, and have disdain for people who want intimacy and a close relationship. They don’t want to depend on other people or have others depend on them, which protects them from rejection and disappointment.

Codependency

For codependents, the task of individuation isn’t successfully traversed. Much of their suffering is due to incomplete separation-individuation begun in toddlerhood and conflicting needs for maternal attachment vs. autonomy. Power struggles that accompany individuation in childhood and adolescence frequently continue into adult relationships. Boundaries are difficult to distinguish and establish. Insecure attachments in adult relationships reflect insecure and inconsistent parenting. The dance of intimacy between an anxious pursuer and an avoidant distancer often re-enacts the earlier mother-child drama. The former seeks more closeness and a secure attachment, while the avoidant partner tries to separate and individuate. In actuality, both are codependent but have adapted to an insecure parenting style in different ways.

Developing object constancy and achieving individuation are never finished.[10] Similarly, our attachment style is updated by our adult relational experiences. Secure relationships help us grow. Overcoming codependency promotes individuation and secure attachments. You can practice these steps to change your attachment style and attract a secure relationship. Raise Your Self-Esteem and develop self-love .

© Darlene Lancer 2021

1 I. Blom, A. Bergman. (2013) “Observing Development: A Comparative View of Attachment Theory and Separation–Individuation,” in Eds. J.E. Bettmann and D.D. Friedman, Attachment-Based Clinical Work with Children and Adolescents. pp. 9-44. New York: Springer Science+Business Media.

2. Rubens, R. L. (1996). “The unique origins of Fairbairn’s Theories.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives. 6(3): 413–435.

3. D.K. Lapsky, J. Edgerton. (2002). “ Separation-Individualization, Adult Attachment Style, and College Adjustment .” Journal of Counseling & Development. Vol. 80:484-492.

4. Horner, A. (1995). Object Relations and the Developing Ego in Therapy . United States: Jason Aronson Incorporated.

5. D.K. Lapsky, J. Edgerton. Ibid.

6. Van IJzendoorn, et al. (2000). The similarity of siblings’ attachments to their mother. Child Dev Jul-Aug; 71(4):1086-98.

7. J. Birch. (August 16, 2018). “ Knowing your ‘attachment style’ could make you a smarter dater, ” Washington Post.

8. D.K. Lapsky, J. Edgerton. Ibid.

10. Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books

Turmoil at NPR after editor rips network for political bias

The public radio network is being targeted by conservative activists over the editor’s essay, which many staffers say is misleading and inaccurate.

Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for a quarter-century when he wrote the essay that would abruptly end his tenure. On April 9, the Free Press published 3,500 words from Berliner, a senior business editor, about how the public radio network is guilty of journalistic malpractice — for conforming to a politically liberal worldview at the expense of fairness and accuracy.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,” Berliner wrote. “We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed.”

The essay, whose arguments were disputed by NPR management and many staffers, plunged the network into a week-long public controversy.

Last week NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, indirectly referenced Berliner’s essay in a note to staff that NPR also published online. “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” she wrote. “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

The drama reached a pinnacle Wednesday, when Berliner resigned while taking a shot at Maher.

In his resignation letter, Berliner called NPR “a great American institution” that should not be defunded. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote in the letter, posted on his X account. “But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Berliner’s comments have angered many of his now-former colleagues, who dismissed as inaccurate his depiction of their workplace and who say his faulty criticisms have been weaponized against them.

Berliner’s essay is titled “ I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust .” On its face, it seemed to confirm the worst suspicions held by NPR’s critics on the right: that the legendary media organization had an ideological, progressive agenda that dictates its journalism. The Free Press is an online publication started by journalist Bari Weiss, whose own resignation from the New York Times in 2020 was used by conservative politicians as evidence that the Times stifled certain ideas and ideologies; Weiss accused the Times of catering to a rigid, politically left-leaning worldview and of refusing to defend her against online “bullies” when she expressed views to the contrary. Berliner’s essay was accompanied by several glossy portraits and a nearly hour-long podcast interview with Weiss. He also went on NewsNation, where the host Chris Cuomo — who had been cast out from CNN for crossing ethical lines to help his governor-brother — called Berliner a “whistleblower.”

Initially, Berliner was suspended for not getting approval for doing work for another publication. NPR policy requires receiving written permission from supervisors “for all outside freelance and journalistic work,” according to the employee handbook.

An NPR spokeswoman said Wednesday that the network does not comment on personnel matters. Berliner declined The Washington Post’s request for further comment.

In an interview Tuesday with NPR’s David Folkenflik — whose work is also criticized in the Free Press essay — Berliner said “we have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they’re capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.”

Berliner’s future at NPR became an open question. NPR leaders were pressed by staff in meetings this week as to why he was still employed there. And some reporters made clear they didn’t want to be edited by Berliner anymore because they now questioned his journalistic judgment, said one prominent NPR journalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships. “How are you supposed to have honest debates about coverage if you think it’s going to be fodder for the point he’s trying to make?” the staffer said.

Berliner had written that “there’s an unspoken consensus” about stories to pursue at NPR — “of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies” — and that the network operated without friction, “almost like an assembly line.”

Several prominent NPR journalists countered that impression. “We have strong, heated editorial debates every day to try and get the most appropriate language and nuanced reporting in a landscape that is divisive and difficult to work in as a journalist,” Leila Fadel, host of “Morning Edition,” told The Post. “Media and free independent press are often under attack for the fact-based reporting that we do.” She called Berliner’s essay “a bad-faith effort” and a “factually inaccurate take on our work that was filled with omissions to back his arguments.”

Other staffers noted that Berliner did not seek comment from NPR for his piece. No news organization is above reproach, “Weekend Edition” host Ayesha Rascoe told The Post, but someone should not “be able to tear down an entire organization’s work without any sort of response or context provided, or pushback.” There are many legitimate critiques to make of NPR’s coverage, she added, “but the way this has been done — it’s to invalidate all the work NPR does.”

NPR is known to have a very collegial culture, and the manner in which Berliner aired his criticism — perhaps even more than the substance of it — is what upset so many of his co-workers, according to one staffer.

“Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep, writing on his Substack on Tuesday , fact-checked or contextualized several of the arguments Berliner made. For instance: Berliner wrote that he once asked “why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate — Latinx.” Inskeep said he searched 90 days of NPR’s content and found “Latinx” was used nine times — “usually by a guest” — compared to the nearly 400 times “Latina” and “Latino” were used.

“This article needed a better editor,” Inskeep wrote. “I don’t know who, if anyone, edited Uri’s story, but they let him publish an article that discredited itself. … A careful read of the article shows many sweeping statements for which the writer is unable to offer evidence.”

This week conservative activist Christopher Rufo — who rose to fame for targeting “critical race theory,” and whose scrutiny of Harvard President Claudine Gay preceded her resignation — set his sights on Maher, surfacing old social media posts she wrote before she joined the news organization. In one 2020 tweet, she referred to Trump as a “deranged racist.” Others posts show her wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris. Rufo has called for Maher’s resignation.

“In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,” Maher wrote in a statement to The Post, when asked about the social media posts. “What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public.”

Maher, who started her job as NPR CEO last month, previously was the head of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. An NPR spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time” of the social media posts; she was “exercising her first amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen,” and “the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions.”

In a statement, an NPR spokesperson described the outcry over Maher’s old posts as “a bad faith attack that follows an established playbook, as online actors with explicit agendas work to discredit independent news organizations.”

Meanwhile, some NPR staffers want a more forceful defense of NPR journalism by management. An internal letter — signed by about 50 NPR staffers as of Wednesday afternoon — called on Maher and NPR editor in chief Edith Chapin to “publicly and directly” call out Berliner’s “factual inaccuracies and elisions.”

In the essay, Berliner accuses NPR of mishandling three major stories: the allegations of the 2016 Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, the origins of the coronavirus , and the authenticity and relevance of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Berliner’s critics note that he didn’t oversee coverage of these stories. They also say that his essay indirectly maligns employee affinity groups — he name-checks groups for Muslim, Jewish, queer and Black employees, which he wrote “reflect broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic at birth.” (Berliner belonged to the group for Jewish employees, according to an NPR staffer with knowledge of membership.) He also writes that he found NPR’s D.C. newsroom employed 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans in editorial positions in 2021. His critics say this figure lacks proper context.

Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, told The Post that “I have no idea where he got that number,” that NPR’s newsroom has 660 employees, and that “I know a number of our hosts and staff are registered as independents.” That includes Inskeep, who, on his Substack, backed up Cavin’s assessment.

Berliner also wrote that, during the administration of Donald Trump , NPR “hitched our wagon” to top Trump antagonist Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) by interviewing him 25 times about Trump and Russia. Cavin told The Post NPR aired 900 interviews with lawmakers during the same period of time, “so that’s 3 percent. He’s a business reporter, he knows about statistics and it seems he’s selectively using statistics.”

Cavin said some inside the organization agree with points Berliner made, even if they “don’t like the way he went about it. The irony of this is it tells you how diverse as an organization we are, in ideological terms.”

“There are a few bits of truth in this,” NPR international correspondent Eyder Peralta wrote on Facebook. But he said the essay “uses a selecting reading to serve the author’s own world views” and paints with “too broad a brush.”

“I have covered wars, I have been thrown in jail for my work,” Peralta told The Post, “and for him to question part of what is in our nature, which is intellectual curiosity and that we follow our noses where they lead us, that hurts. And I think that damages NPR.”

Some staffers have also been attacked online since the essay’s publication. Rascoe, who, as a Black woman host for NPR, says she’s no stranger to online vitriol, but one message after Berliner’s essay labeled her as a “DEI hire” who has “never read a book in her life.”

“What stung about this one was it came on the basis of a supposed colleague’s op-ed,” whose words were “being used as fodder to attack me,” Rascoe said. “And my concern is not about me, but all the younger journalists who don’t have the platform I have and who will be attacked and their integrity questioned simply on the basis of who they are.”

NPR, like much of the media industry, has struggled in recent years with a declining audience and a tough ad market. NPR laid off 100 workers in 2023, one of its largest layoffs ever , citing fewer sponsorships and a projected $30 million decline in revenue.

Going forward, some staffers worry about the ramifications of Berliner’s essay and the reactions to it. The open letter to Maher and Chapin said that “sending the message that a public essay is the easiest way to make change is setting a bad precedent, regardless of the ideologies being expressed.”

An earlier version of this article included a reference to Uri Berliner's Free Press essay in which Berliner cited voter registration data for editorial employees of NPR's D.C. newsroom. The article has been updated to clarify that this data was from 2021, not the present day.

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