Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver: the day attachment entered the couple

Who are Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver?

Phillip Shaver is an American social psychologist born in 1944. In the mid-1980s he taught at the University of Denver and studied emotions, loneliness and close relationships. Cindy Hazan was then his doctoral student. She earned her PhD at Denver in 1988 and joined Cornell University the same year, where she has since run a lab devoted to adult attachment and teaches a course on human bonding that generations of students have taken.

Their 1987 paper, “Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, became one of the ten most cited articles in the journal’s history. In 2012, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology gave them an award for the scientific impact of this work. Shaver, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, went on to form the field’s most productive partnership with the Israeli psychologist Mario Mikulincer. Their book “Attachment in Adulthood” (2007, second edition 2016) is the reference synthesis.

Why does it matter for your relationship? Because before them, an adult who panicked over an unanswered text had no framework for understanding it. After them, that reaction has a name, an origin and a logic: an attachment system doing its job. This page covers the 1987 study, then the Mikulincer and Shaver synthesis that turned it into an experimental science.

The central idea

Romantic love is an attachment process. Hazan and Shaver start from an observation: what Bowlby and Ainsworth describe between a baby and a parent looks remarkably like what two people in love go through. We seek the other person’s closeness, feel safe in their presence, suffer in their absence, and use them as a base to face the world. Even the language is the same: long gazes, pet names, caresses, the need for physical contact.

If the system is the same, then the individual differences described in children should have an adult equivalent. That is the bet of the paper: translate Ainsworth’s three styles (secure, avoidant, anxious-ambivalent) into three ways of loving, and check that they go with different love experiences, different beliefs about love and different memories of childhood.

Key concepts

The newspaper questionnaire

The method became famous. Hazan and Shaver ran a “love quiz” of about a hundred questions in the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver daily. They received 620 usable responses: 205 men and 415 women, aged 14 to 82. The centerpiece of the questionnaire fit into three short paragraphs: each person had to choose the one that best described how they experience close relationships. The rest covered the most important romantic relationship of their life and their parents.

The three adult styles

The first paragraph describes someone who is comfortable with closeness and isn’t afraid of being abandoned or of depending on others: the secure style. The second describes someone who is uneasy with closeness and finds it hard to trust and to depend on others: the avoidant style. The third describes someone who feels that others are reluctant to get as close as they would like and who often worries about not being truly loved: the anxious-ambivalent style. The fourth adult style, now called disorganized or fearful, didn’t arrive until 1991, with the four-category model of Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz.

Mental models of love

A style doesn’t just describe behavior. It goes with beliefs about love. Secure people see love as lasting, with ups and downs. Avoidant people doubt that romantic love really exists or can last. Anxious people fall in love easily but rarely find what they call true love. And each group describes their parents differently: warmth and availability for the secure, coldness or rejection for the avoidant, unfairness and inconsistency for the anxious. A second study, with 108 students, focused on self-image and found the same contrasts.

Hyperactivation and deactivation

Twenty years later, Mikulincer and Shaver proposed a model of the system built on three questions. First question: is my attachment figure available? If so, security sets in and frees up energy for the rest of life. If not, second question: can seeking closeness work? If so, the system turns up the volume: that is hyperactivation, the anxious strategy (reaching out again, watching for signs, protesting). If not, it cuts the signal: that is deactivation, the avoidant strategy (pulling away, downplaying, relying only on yourself). Two opposite strategies for the same goal: keeping the bond as safe as possible.

What the research says

The 1987 paper is a questionnaire study, not an experiment. Its strength is that it opened a field that hundreds of studies have since filled. Here is what it shows, and what came after.

• The proportions. Among the 620 readers, 56% described themselves as secure, 25% as avoidant and 19% as anxious-ambivalent. These proportions are strikingly close to those observed in babies in the Strange Situation, which points to continuity in the system.
• Love experiences. Each style went with a different experience of the most important relationship: trust and friendship for the secure, fear of intimacy and emotional ups and downs for the avoidant, obsession, jealousy and a desire to merge for the anxious.
• The organizing framework. In 1994, Hazan and Shaver proposed in Psychological Inquiry that attachment become the framework organizing all research on close relationships, with four criteria for a true attachment bond: proximity seeking, separation distress, safe haven and secure base.
• Experiments. Mikulincer and Shaver later tested the model in the lab: threat-related words, flashed too fast to be read consciously, make attachment representations more accessible. Secure people respond with more compassion, anxious people with overwhelming worries, and avoidant people by shutting down, a shutdown that gives way under mental load.
• From boxes to axes. In 1998, an analysis of all existing scales showed that the styles boil down to two dimensions, anxiety and avoidance. This is the basis of the ECR-R scale and of the modern way of reading adult attachment.

Limits and criticisms

The 1987 study has the limits of its method. The respondents were newspaper readers who chose to answer, not a representative sample. Style was measured by a single forced choice among three paragraphs, a crude measure that research quickly replaced. Childhood memories are retrospective, so they are colored by current mood and by the current relationship. And nothing is longitudinal: the study shows associations, not trajectories.

The three-category model didn’t hold up. Bartholomew and Horowitz added a fourth style, then the analyses of Chris Fraley and Niels Waller showed that there are no natural categories: attachment is spread continuously across two axes. Another important limit: questionnaires like this one and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which analyzes how someone tells the story of their childhood, don’t measure the same thing. A 2007 synthesis finds a link between the two that ranges from none to weak.

Finally, popularization turned “style” into an identity, which the authors never wrote. Style depends partly on the relationship: you can be secure with your partner and anxious with a parent. Its stability over time is real but moderate. MyLoveLab holds to this nuance: your style is a region where you find yourself right now, not a box.

How MyLoveLab uses it

The Attachment and security dimension descends directly from this line of research: Hazan and Shaver for the idea, Brennan, Clark and Shaver for the two axes, Fraley for the ECR-R scale, which the MyLoveLab test draws on without being it. In the program, level 2 takes up Mikulincer and Shaver’s two strategies so you can draw the map of your alarm system, and level 3 turns them toward your partner: reading their reactions without sticking a label on them. The anxious-avoidant cycle has its own article: the anxious-avoidant couple.

Further reading

• Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process · Article, 1987The landmark paper: the newspaper questionnaire, the three adult styles and their mental models of love.
• Love as attachment: The integration of three behavioral systems · Chapter, 1988With Donna Bradshaw: love as a combination of three systems, attachment, caregiving and sexuality.
• Attachment as an organizational framework for research on close relationships · Article, 1994The manifesto: making attachment the framework for all research on close relationships.
• Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change · Book, 2007By Mikulincer and Shaver: the reference synthesis, dense, with the hyperactivation and deactivation model. Second edition in 2016.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Hazan, C. & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.
2. Shaver, P. R., Hazan, C. & Bradshaw, D. (1988). Love as attachment: The integration of three behavioral systems. In R. J. Sternberg & M. L. Barnes (dir.), The Psychology of Love (p. 68-99). Yale University Press.
3. Bartholomew, K. & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 226-244.
4. Hazan, C. & Shaver, P. R. (1994). Attachment as an organizational framework for research on close relationships. Psychological Inquiry, 5(1), 1-22.
5. Fraley, R. C. & Shaver, P. R. (2000). Adult romantic attachment: Theoretical developments, emerging controversies, and unanswered questions. Review of General Psychology, 4(2), 132-154.
6. Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P. R. (2003). The attachment behavioral system in adulthood: Activation, psychodynamics, and interpersonal processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 53-152.
7. Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford.
8. Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E. & Clarke, A. (2007). The Adult Attachment Interview and self-reports of attachment style: An empirical rapprochement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(4), 678-697.

See the full bibliography