6 questions across 1 test in this category.
No, on purpose. The researchers behind the reference model found that attachment differences are a matter of degree, not category: people vary continuously on anxiety and on avoidance, and cutting the scores into types throws information away. Your report gives you a position on each dimension. The familiar labels (secure, preoccupied, dismissing, fearful) appear only as a reading aid for the combination, never as a verdict on what you are.
Yes. The statements ask about how you operate in intimate and close relationships in general: partners past and present, and the few people who really know you. You do not need a current partner to have an attachment pattern; it shows in how you remember old relationships, how you handle new closeness, and who you call when something breaks. Taking it between relationships is actually a good moment, because the pattern is easier to see without a specific person attached to every answer.
The two dimensions this test measures come from published attachment research, specifically the model behind the ECR-R of Fraley, Waller and Brennan (2000). The 24 statements you answer are NOESIS's own wording: no item text is taken from the original questionnaire, and the original's published statistics (reliability, norms) do not apply to these items. If you need a validated instrument for research, use the original under its own terms; if you want a structured, honest way to look at your own pattern, this is built for that.
No. The quadrant is a didactic picture of where your two scores land together, and its names are shorthand, not clinical categories. Attachment researchers, including the ECR-R's first author, argue explicitly against classifying people from these scores, and this test follows that position. Nothing in your report is a diagnosis of you or your relationship; if relationship distress is causing real suffering, a couples or individual therapist reads that far better than any questionnaire.
The research tradition treats attachment as stable enough to be worth measuring and plastic enough to be worth working on. Long relationships with reliable people, therapy, and sometimes just naming the pattern move the dial, slowly. What changes fastest is not the reflex but what you do two seconds after it fires: the anxious impulse to demand proof and the avoidant impulse to go quiet both become choices once you can see them coming.
It is one of the best uses of the test. Much couple friction around closeness is two normal patterns colliding: one person reads distance as danger and moves closer, the other reads pursuit as pressure and steps back, and each step confirms the other's fear. Two separate results put that loop on the table in neutral language. Each of you answers alone, then you compare: not to decide who is the problem, but to see which loop your two positions predict.
