Experiences in Close Relationships Scale
Also known as: ECR, Adult Attachment Scale, Brennan-Clark-Shaver Attachment 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.
Key highlights
- Captures attachment as two reliable, continuous dimensions rather than crude categories.
- Empirically derived from the full pool of prior attachment measures.
- Strongly predictive of relationship and emotion-regulation outcomes.
- Widely used, enabling comparability and well suited to dyadic analysis.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use the ECR when you want a reliable, dimensional self-report measure of adult attachment for research on romantic relationships, emotion regulation, support processes, or individual differences in close-relationship functioning, including as actor and partner variables in dyadic (APIM) analyses. The dimensional approach is preferable to forced categorical styles for most research. It is less appropriate for assessing attachment to specific figures other than romantic partners (where relationship-specific versions exist), for children (where developmental measures apply), or when interview-based assessment of attachment states of mind is the goal. Researchers should report subscale reliabilities and consider the ECR-R for improved measurement precision, and test invariance before group comparisons.
Strengths & limitations
- Captures attachment as two reliable, continuous dimensions rather than crude categories.
- Empirically derived from the full pool of prior attachment measures.
- Strongly predictive of relationship and emotion-regulation outcomes.
- Widely used, enabling comparability and well suited to dyadic analysis.
- Self-report cannot capture unconscious or interview-assessed attachment representations.
- Measures general romantic attachment, not attachment to specific other figures without adaptation.
- Two-dimensional model simplifies a complex construct.
- Cross-cultural and dyadic measurement invariance must be verified.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What two dimensions does the ECR measure?
The ECR measures attachment anxiety -- fear of rejection and abandonment with a strong desire for closeness and reassurance -- and attachment avoidance -- discomfort with intimacy and dependence and a preference for self-reliance. These two largely independent dimensions define a space whose regions correspond to secure, preoccupied, dismissing, and fearful attachment styles.
Why measure attachment dimensionally rather than categorically?
Brennan, Clark, and Shaver found that the many prior attachment measures reduced to two continuous dimensions, and dimensional scores retain more information and statistical power than sorting people into four categories. Continuous anxiety and avoidance scores predict outcomes more precisely and are well suited to dyadic models, so most research uses the dimensions rather than forced style categories.
How does the ECR-R differ from the ECR?
The ECR-R, developed by Fraley, Waller, and Brennan, revised the item set using item-response-theory analyses to improve measurement precision, especially toward the secure end of each dimension. It measures the same anxiety and avoidance constructs as the ECR, and researchers often prefer it when finer measurement precision is needed, reporting which version they used.
Sources
- 1.Brennan, K. A., Clark, C. L., & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Self-report measurement of adult romantic attachment: An integrative overview. In J. A. Simpson & W. S. Rholes (Eds.), Attachment Theory and Close Relationships (pp. 46-76). Guilford Press.ISBN 9781572302365
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Experiences in Close Relationships Scale. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/social-psychology/experiences-in-close-relationships-scale