Attachment style test

Brain Quiz's attachment questionnaire has 24 items and takes about 7 minutes. It places your answers on two continuous dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, alongside two reading axes: relational security and how you handle disagreement. The full result appears free of charge, with no account and no email address.

Attachment describes the way a person seeks, accepts or holds at arm's length the support of the people who matter to them. The idea grew out of research on early bonds and was extended to adult relationships by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver in a 1987 paper on romantic love understood as an attachment process. It is not only about romance. The same tendencies show up in friendships, in family ties and, in a milder form, at work. That is why the items here talk about people close to you and about important relationships, without assuming that you are currently in a couple.

Two readings coexist in the literature. The first sorts people into four categories; Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz published an influential version of that four-category model in 1991. The second, more recent, describes two continuous and largely independent dimensions. Attachment anxiety covers the fear of losing someone's availability and the need for reassurance that goes with it. Avoidance covers the move away from closeness and the difficulty of depending on anyone. Chris Fraley, Niels Waller and Kelly Brennan analysed self-report measures of adult attachment using item response theory in 2000, and the Experiences in Close Relationships scale, whose short form was examined by Meifen Wei and colleagues in 2007, is built on those two dimensions.

Brain Quiz uses the two-dimension reading, and explains it rather than hiding it. Most attachment tests online hand back a single label, sometimes with a percentage, which suggests there are four kinds of people. The four familiar names are in fact four zones of one map. Low anxiety with low avoidance describes relational ease. High anxiety with low avoidance describes a strong pull towards closeness and towards visible signs of reassurance. Low anxiety with high avoidance describes a defensive self-reliance, where closeness feels like a constraint. High anxiety with high avoidance describes a contradictory movement, where wanting the bond and fearing it sit side by side. Nobody sits permanently in one zone.

The questionnaire adds two reading axes. Relational security covers how easily you ask for support and take it when it is offered. Its six items are scored in reverse so that the overall index keeps a single direction. Handling disagreement covers what happens during and after a tension: staying in the exchange, then coming back to repair it. This is the axis that moves fastest when a relationship changes, which makes it a practical place to start.

The calculation is simple and published. Each answer is worth 0 to 4 points, multiplied by an item weight between 1 and 3. The four axes carry the same total weight, and the overall score is rescaled to 100. It reads as an index of attachment insecurity: the higher it is, the more your answers describe relationships lived under strain. The weights and the band thresholds were set by our editorial team. They come from no population calibration, and the methodology page says so in the same words.

This questionnaire does not go back through your history. It says nothing about your childhood, predicts no relationship, and can neither establish nor rule out a condition. It describes tendencies reported at one moment, in the relationships you have in mind while answering. Those tendencies vary from one relationship to another and from one period to the next: the same person may answer differently six months later, after a break-up, a birth, a move or a stretch of overload.

In this field, the usual pattern is to charge for the report or to funnel the reader into a paid programme. Brain Quiz shows the full score, the four axes and the matching notes with nothing asked in return: no email capture, no sign-up. The methodology page is public and states where the items come from, which references were consulted and which limits we accept. A paid detailed report exists, adding a cross-reading of the axes and a comparison over time, but it is never required to see your result.

If the result worries you, the useful question is not the number but its effect: are these patterns weighing on your relationships, your sleep, your work? If they are, talking to a psychologist or another health professional is a reasonable step, and this questionnaire can serve as the starting point for that conversation.