Experiences in Close Relationships Scale

The Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) scale, developed by Brennan, Clark, and Shaver in 1998, is the most widely used self-report measure of adult romantic attachment. The authors factor-analyzed essentially all existing English-language attachment measures and found that they reduced to two orthogonal dimensions: attachment anxiety, the fear of rejection and abandonment and a craving for closeness and reassurance, and attachment avoidance, discomfort with intimacy and dependence and a preference for self-reliance. The resulting 36-item scale, with 18 items per dimension rated on a Likert scale, locates each respondent in a two-dimensional attachment space whose regions correspond to the familiar secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and fearful styles. Highly reliable and extensively validated, the ECR (and its revision, the ECR-R) became the standard instrument for studying how attachment shapes relationship functioning, emotion regulation, and support-seeking across close relationships.