Thirty-six statements measure two continuous dimensions in romantic attachment: anxiety and avoidance.
Method and research sourcesECR-R measures attachment-related anxiety—worry about rejection, love, and availability—and attachment-related avoidance—discomfort with closeness, disclosure, and depending on a romantic partner.
Items 1–18 form anxiety and items 19–36 form avoidance. Fourteen positively worded items are scored in the opposite direction behind the scenes. Each scale is the mean of 18 answers, preserving the original 1–7 range.
The author's official page supplies all items, the corrected scoring equations, cautions about norms, and guidance against forced categories. The original IRT paper and temporal-stability study provide the research basis.
R. Chris Fraley, University of Illinois
R. Chris Fraley, Niels G. Waller, Kelly A. Brennan
Chris G. Sibley, James H. Liu
Related resources address closeness, loneliness, and couple communication—not diagnosis or fixed attachment labels.
Secure, anxious and avoidant attachment: what these labels mean, why they are not diagnoses, and ways to address recurring relationship difficulties.
Why you may pull away after getting close, how to distinguish fear from not wanting a relationship, and practical ways to preserve connection, consent and choice.
Reflect on agreement, satisfaction, shared activities, and affection in a current couple relationship with the 32-item DAS.
Use the 20-item UCLA Loneliness Scale to reflect on perceived social connection and isolation without diagnostic labels.
Explore six different ways loneliness may be experienced with E. A. Manakova's 30-item questionnaire.
Reflect on feelings, agreement, home life, conflict, tenderness, and overall satisfaction in a marriage or long-term partnership.
Explore difficulty identifying and describing feelings and externally oriented thinking with the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale.
Count ten categories of adverse childhood experiences and read a trauma-informed explanation of what an ACE score can and cannot tell you.
No. The author explicitly recommends continuous anxiety and avoidance scores because categories discard information and have no natural boundaries.
Yes. People can show general tendencies while also responding differently to particular partners, stages, stressors, and experiences.
They are scored in the opposite direction to balance the measure. The front end does not mark them as reverse-scored because the key should not guide answers.
