What are ‘attachment styles,’ and is there science to back them up
Attachment styles are a popular way to understand how people experience relationships and why they may struggle to be vulnerable with loved ones. They’re a popular topic of conversation – especially in online spaces – so you may be familiar with terms like “secure” and “insecure” attachment, or “anxious” and “avoidant” attachment.
But is there actual science behind attachment styles
The short answer is yes – but there are a lot of misconceptions about what a person’s attachment style can tell you about them.
Psychologists use attachment styles to describe people’s approach to relationships. However, these styles don’t necessarily rule people’s relationships, nor can people always be neatly categorised into these different ways of interacting. Instead, attachment styles occur along a continuum, and people can be “secure” in some types of relationships and “insecure” in others.
“There is no magical threshold at which a person suddenly becomes secure or insecure,” said R. Chris Fraley, a social and personality psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who studies attachment. Nor is there a certain amount of relationship-related trauma in someone’s past that determines their attachment style, Fraley told Live Science. People vary widely in their response to poor parenting or an unreliable romantic partner, for example.
What are the different attachment styles
These styles come from attachment theory, which arose from work done in the late 1960s by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby hypothesized that if young children do not form a secure attachment with a primary caregiver in early childhood, they will struggle to do so throughout their lives.
To test this idea, Ainsworth designed an experiment in which children around 1 year of age are left by their parents to play alone in an unfamiliar room for a few minutes. Then, the parent returns. Psychologists look at how the child reacts to the parent leaving and returning.
Over time, other psychologists began to consider these attachment styles in the context of adult relationships.
There are different ways to measure attachment, but a common method that social and personality psychologists use is to measure a person’s attachment-related avoidance and attachment-related anxiety, usually through questionnaires about their relationships and behaviors.
A person who is avoidant in a relationship tends to shy away from intimacy or opportunities to reveal their feelings; they have difficulty trusting others and may push people away if they feel they are getting too close. Meanwhile, a person who is anxious in a relationship feels insecure, worries that the other person does not really care about them, and may thus become clingy and uncomfortably dependent on their partner.
A person who is low in both avoidance and anxiety is considered securely attached, Fraley said.
“We consider a person ‘secure’ in his or her relationship if he or she feels comfortable relying on the person, using the person as a safe haven in times of crisis, and is confident that the person is genuinely invested in his or her well-being,” he said.
Fraley said that on average, there is a link between people’s early childhood experiences and their adult attachment styles. People who experience abuse, neglect or otherwise cold or unpredictable caregiving in childhood are more likely to struggle with attachment in adult relationships. However, he added, childhood experiences don’t necessarily seal your fate — there are many people who face bad experiences early in life but have secure adult relationships, and vice versa. “People change, relationship experiences change, and life becomes complicated in ways that cannot be understood simply by knowing what happened early in a person’s life,” Fraley said. “Most attachment scholars view attachment as reflecting the history of a person’s interpersonal experiences, not something that occurred at a specific time. Although there is some continuity in people’s interpersonal histories, the twists and turns also matter.”