Attachment

Experiences in Close Relationships – Short Form (ECR-SF)

The Experiences in Close Relationships, Short Form (ECR-SF) measures two sides of how you experience close relationships, namely how much you worry about rejection or abandonment and how comfortable you are with closeness and depending on others.

You learn where you fall on attachment anxiety and avoidance, and what that says about how you love.

For anyone who wants to understand how they handle closeness and distance with a partner.

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Your answers stay private.

It comes from adult attachment research on anxiety about rejection and discomfort with intimacy.

Sample result, example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

What this test is

Welcome. The 12-item Experiences in Close Relationships – Short Form (Wei et al., 2007) measures two core dimensions of adult attachment in romantic relationships: Attachment Anxiety (concern about abandonment and partner availability) and Attachment Avoidance (discomfort with closeness and emotional dependence). Scores place you in a two-dimensional space whose quadrants correspond to the Secure, Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant, and Fearful-Avoidant prototypes.

The measure

The Experiences in Close Relationships – Short Form (ECR-SF) was developed by Wei and colleagues (2007). It has 12 items, each answered on a 7-point (Strongly Disagree … Strongly Agree) scale. Its scores cover Attachment Anxiety and Attachment Avoidance.

Wei, M., Russell, D. W., Mallinckrodt, B., & Vogel, D. L. (2007). The Experiences in Close Relationship Scale (ECR)-Short Form: Reliability, validity, and factor structure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 88(2), 187-204. Items drawn from Brennan, Clark & Shaver (1998).

Structure

Two scales, six statements each. How the questionnaire is organized.

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Attachment Anxiety: 6 of the 12 items.
Attachment Avoidance: 6 of the 12 items.

Two separate dimensions. Schematic: the two scales are scored separately. The figure has no regions or dividing lines.

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Horizontal dimension, Attachment Avoidance: closeness and dependence, from lower to higher.
Vertical dimension, Attachment Anxiety: worry about rejection or abandonment in close relationships, from lower to higher.
The two dimensions are scored separately. The figure has no regions or dividing lines.

How a question looks. Format example. The statement is a placeholder, not one of the questionnaire’s items.

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Placeholder statement (not a real question): A statement about how you generally feel in close relationships.
Answer choices, in order: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Slightly Disagree, Neutral, Slightly Agree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
You choose the one answer that fits best for each statement.
4 of the 12 items are reverse-keyed.

The scales and what each describes
Scale	Items	What it covers
Attachment Anxiety	6	How much you worry about rejection or abandonment in close relationships. A higher standing: you tend to seek reassurance and to worry about a partner's availability. A lower standing: you tend to feel secure about closeness and rarely fear abandonment.
Attachment Avoidance	6	How uncomfortable you are with closeness and dependence. A higher standing: you tend to keep emotional distance and to value self-reliance in relationships. A lower standing: you tend to be comfortable with closeness and with depending on others.

What it measures

Twelve statements ask how a person generally experiences close relationships. Six concern attachment anxiety: worrying about being abandoned, needing a great deal of reassurance, and feeling frustrated when a partner is not available. Six concern attachment avoidance: discomfort with depending on a partner, reluctance to open up, and wanting to keep some distance when a partner wants closeness. The two dimensions are independent, so a person can be high on both, low on both, or high on one only.

Attachment theory began with Bowlby (1969), who described how early bonds with caregivers shape expectations about whether others will be available in times of need. Hazan and Shaver (1987) extended the theory to adult romantic love. Brennan, Clark and Shaver (1998) pooled the many existing adult attachment measures and found that they reduced to two dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, and Wei, Russell, Mallinckrodt and Vogel (2007) drew this twelve-item short form from their longer questionnaire.

Each dimension is scored from six statements. Higher anxiety describes stronger concern about rejection and a need for reassurance; higher avoidance describes a preference for self-reliance and emotional distance. Low scores on both correspond to what is often called secure attachment. The report places a person on the two dimensions and describes the pattern they form; it is a description of relationship tendencies, not a diagnosis.

The scale is used in couples and individual therapy, in research on relationships and emotion regulation, and in personal reflection. On this site, the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (RSQ) describes anxious expectations of rejection, the Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC-32) describes interpersonal style more broadly, and the Need to Belong Scale measures the underlying motivation for connection.

Where it comes from, and how well it holds up

The ECR-SF is a shortened version of the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998), therefore a brief discussion of the original scale is warranted. The ECR was the end product of a large-scale factor analytic study of all known selfreport scales for assessing adult attachment styles totaling 362 test-items that were administered to 1,100 undergraduate participants (Brennan et al., 1998; see Wei et al., 2007, for a review). Brennan et al.’s (1998) factor analysis detected two, generally independent factors or dimensions, avoidant attachment and anxious attachment, respectively. Brennan et al. (1998) then kept the 18 items with the highest loadings on the two factors, respectively, yielding a total of 36 items for the complete ECR, with two subscales, each comprised of 18-items.

In a series of six studies, Wei et al. (2007) derived a 12-item version of the ECR (i.e., the ECR-SF; Wei et al., 2007) from the 6 items on the ECR that had the highest factor loadings on each attachment dimension of the longer measure. The ECR-SF anxiety and avoidance subscales have shown strong construct validity (see Wei et al., 2007). The attachment anxiety subscale has demonstrated significant positive correlations with measures of related constructs, such as intimacy fears and need for reassurance (Wei et al., 2007, p. 195).

Secure and insecure attachment

In Wei et al.’s (2007) account, people who report high attachment anxiety, high attachment avoidance, or both are described as insecurely attached, and people who report low levels of both are described as securely attached, consistent with Bowlby’s original categorical model (Wei et al., 2007).

Clinical applications

Couples therapy
Attachment research
Individual therapy
General population

Test information

Test information
Format	12 short statements about you, answered one screen at a time
Answer scale	7 points, from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree
Pace	Self-paced
Structure	2 scales, 6 items each
Scoring	Ratings are added up separately for each scale; 4 of the 12 items are reverse-keyed
Administration	Online, on your own; clinicians and researchers can also assign it through a private link
Reference sample	None on this site; scores are not compared with a reference group
Source	Wei, M., Russell, D. W., Mallinckrodt, B., & Vogel, D. L. (2007). The Experiences in Close Relationship Scale (ECR)-Short Form: Reliability, validity, and factor structure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 88(2), 187-204.
Purpose	Self-exploration, or assigned by a clinician.
Age range	Adults 18 and up.
Languages	English only.
Research samples	Most of the published research behind this measure comes from college student samples, so results should be interpreted with caution.

How it is scored

How it is scored. Schematic of the scoring steps. No item keys or weights are shown.

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Step 1: You rate 12 statements
Step 2: 4 reverse-worded statements are flipped
Step 3: The six ratings for each dimension are added up
Step 4: Two scores: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance

Evidence

Sample report preview

The report opens with a profile of your scores on each of the 2 scales (Attachment Anxiety and Attachment Avoidance), drawn on a common scale so the highest and lowest areas stand out. Each one then receives a short plain-language explanation of what a higher or lower standing describes. It closes with guidance on reading the results and on the limits of self-report.

What the report includes

Separate scores for attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, a two-dimensional plot showing where those scores place you among the four attachment patterns (secure, preoccupied, dismissing and fearful), and a plain-language guide to what that position tends to mean in close relationships.

Two dimensions say more than a single label: they keep how anxious and how avoidant you are, so a profile near the border between two patterns reads differently from one deep inside either.

Report contents
Section	What it shows
Subscale scores	Your score on each of the 2 subscales.

Example data. Illustrative chart with invented scores; it does not describe any real respondent.

Good uses and limits

Good uses

Describing how you generally experience close relationships, not only a current one.
Completing it without a current partner: the instructions ask about relationships in general.

Not a good use

A diagnosis.
Decisions about other people, such as hiring, custody or admission.
Judging a particular relationship or partner.

Questions

How many items does the ECR-SF have?

12 items: six for attachment anxiety and six for attachment avoidance (Wei et al., 2007).

What response scale is used?

Each item is rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale from 1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (agree strongly); four items are reverse-coded (Wei et al., 2007).

Can someone without a current partner take it?

Yes. Instructions ask how you generally experience relationships, not only a current one, which supports completion without a current partner (Brennan et al., 1998, as cited in Wei et al., 2007).

Is this the full ECR?

No. The ECR-SF is a 12-item short form derived from the 36-item ECR (Brennan et al., 1998; Wei et al., 2007).

References

Wei, M., Russell, D. W., Mallinckrodt, B., & Vogel, D. L. (2007). The Experiences in Close Relationship Scale (ECR)-Short Form: Reliability, validity, and factor structure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 88(2), 187–204.
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 (pp. 46–76). Guilford Press.

Related measures

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