 30. Attachment Theory and Personality  649
A. I am somewhat uncomfortable being close 
to others; I find it difficult to trust them 
completely, difficult to allow myself to de -
pend 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.
Hazan and Shaver (1987) found that the 
frequencies of endorsing the three catego -
ries were similar to the frequencies observed 
in middle-  class samples of infants in the 
Strange Situation: About 56% of adults clas -
sified themselves as secure (paragraph B), 
about 25% as avoidant (paragraph A), and about 19% as anxious–  resistant (paragraph 
C).
Although this measure was useful for 
documenting the association between what 
are now called “attachment styles” and 
relationship functioning, it did not allow 
a full test of the hypothesis that the same 
kinds of individual differences observed in 
infants might also be evident in adults. Re -
searchers have explored this hypothesis in 
a variety of ways in subsequent research. 
For example, Brennan, Clark, and Shaver 
(1998) collected a large number of state -
ments conceptually related to attachment 
(e.g., “I believe that others will be there for 
me when I need them”), correlated people’s 
responses on them, and determined their 
underlying structure using factor analysis. 
Their findings indicated that there are two 
major dimensions: attachment- related anxi -
ety and attachment-  related avoidance (see 
Figure 30.2).  People with high scores on 
attachment-  related anxiety tend to worry 
whether their relationship partner is avail -
FIGURE 30.2. The two-  dimensional model that is commonly used in contemporary social–  personality 
research to conceptualize and partition individual differences in adult attachment. The cardinal lines 
represent the dimensions of attachment-  related anxiety and avoidance, as described by Brennan et 
al. (1998). The diagonal lines capture the four prototypes described by Bartholomew and Horowitz 
(1991).HIGH ANXIETY
HIGH 
AVOIDANCEDEIPUCCOERP ERUCES
FEARFUL–
AVOIDANTDISMISSING–
AVOIDANTLOW 
ANXIETYLOW 
AVOIDANCE