Flourishing and Attachment: The Attachment Project Findings

As part of our commitment to ongoing research, The Attachment Project conducted a study of 23,988 participants from 2025 and the relationships between their attachment styles and sense of flourishing. Our findings suggest a moderate link between both dimensions of attachment and our sense of flourishing.

In this article, we’ll explain a bit about what flourishing is, what it has to do with your attachment style, and how our findings might fit into the bigger picture.

What is Flourishing in Psychology?

Flourishing is a positive psychology concept describing positive life experiences like a sense of well-being, purpose, and quality social relationships. It spans lots of domains, and different models consider and give different weight to different areas of life, but all measure a sense of prosperity and positive experience¹.

What Does Human Flourishing Mean?

In day-to-day life, flourishing is more of a general feeling than a specific experience. People who are flourishing still have bad days, but they overall feel that life is going well. According to distinguished positive psychologist Professor Ed Diener, whose flourishing scale we used in our own research, human flourishing involves a sense of purpose, supportive relationships, and a sense of optimism, competence, and positive self-evaluation¹.

How Do We Measure Flourishing?

Prof. Diener’s Flourishing Scale consists of 8 statements, rated on a 7-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. The statements involve feelings about:

• Whether life feels purposeful
• How supportive social relationships feel
• Feeling interested in daily activities
• Contributing to others’ wellbeing
• Feeling competent
• Feeling like a good person
• Optimism about the future
• Feeling that others respect you

Another model of human flourishing is the PERMA model by Prof. Martin Seligman, also highly esteemed in positive psychology². PERMA is an acronym for Seligman’s 5 elements of well-being:

• Positive emotion: cultivating positive feelings like gratitude, hope, and joy.
• Engagement: feeling interested and engaged in your activities.
• Relationships: a sense of “goodness” in relationships, mutually supportive connections.
• Meaning: a sense of purpose, wherever it comes from.
• Accomplishment: a feeling of competence, achievement, and pride.

You might be able to see how Seligman’s PERMA model matches up with Diener’s Flourishing Scale. But what do these psychological concepts look like in real life?

Examples of Human Flourishing

To help illustrate what flourishing looks like day-to-day, here are a few examples from popular movies – spoilers ahead!

High Flourishing

In Legally Blonde, main character Elle Woods sets her sights on Harvard Law School. It’s a big goal that not everyone thinks is within reach, but she feels optimistic and motivated. She studies hard even after achieving her goal and finds purpose in using her position to help others. She fosters strong, mutually supportive relationships, and feels good about herself despite facing judgement from others. Elle could be described as high flourishing – she has bad days and challenges, but bounces back and believes in herself.

Low Flourishing

In (500) Days of Summer, main character Tom recounts his relationship and eventual breakup. Although he enjoys the benefits of his relationship, his sense of joy and purpose are dependent on it. He doesn’t find motivation or accomplishment in his work or other activities and doesn’t go out of his way to help others. Although he has friends who support him, he doesn’t seem to do the same for his friends. Despite having good days, he could be described as low flourishing. When his relationship ends, he spirals.

Although flourishing is more about a sense of things going well than things actually going well, it makes sense that when we engage with our activities and communities, and look for a sense of meaning and accomplishment, we might experience more success in what’s important to us.

What Gets in the Way of Flourishing?

That said, difficult life experiences can sometimes get in the way of flourishing. Everyone has a limit to the stress they can tolerate, and even the most resilient people can go through times where they don’t feel like they’re resilient or flourishing at all.

Other challenges like emotional dysregulation and low self-worth could also impact your sense of flourishing.

How Attachment Style Shapes Your Capacity to Flourish

We theorized that attachment styles could be associated with flourishing. Since attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety are both linked with difficulties in relationships and emotion regulation, we could assume that higher attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance might be associated with lower flourishing scores.

To test our theory, we asked 23,988 people about their attachment styles and flourishing.

What 23,988 People Reveal About Attachment and Flourishing

The Attachment Project study involved 23,988 participants from 2024-2026. The Experiences in Close Relationships Scale – Relationship Structures (ECR-RS) was used to measure attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance³, and the Diener Flourishing Scale was used to measure flourishing¹.

A Pearson’s correlation test was run to measure the relationships between flourishing and each general attachment style.

We found the following moderate correlations between general attachment avoidance and flourishing, and general attachment anxiety and flourishing:

• Flourishing x general attachment avoidance: -0.43
• Flourishing x general attachment anxiety: -0.40

The “negative” correlation means that the higher the general avoidance/anxiety scores, the lower the flourishing scores were. All correlations are between -1 and 1; -1 would show a perfectly negative correlation (and is very unlikely to happen in psychology), and 0 would show no correlation at all. Therefore, -0.40 and -0.43 are both moderate correlations.

Your general attachment style is your overall approach to attachments.

It’s worth mentioning that our sample, though large and diverse, is still likely biased. People who take our tests want to know their attachment style for a reason, and they may be having a difficult time in relationships or other aspects of well-being. Therefore, our sample may not be representative of a general population and we may attract more participants who score low on both flourishing and attachment security.

General Attachment Security is Associated with Flourishing

If both kinds of attachment insecurity are associated with lower flourishing, we can also say that higher attachment security is associated with greater flourishing.

When we have greater attachment security, we enjoy more fulfilling relationships, greater self-esteem, and resilience. Considering flourishing involves mutually satisfying relationships and a sense of purpose and achievement, it makes sense that it might be associated with attachment security.

It’s important to remember that correlation does not equal causation. We cannot assume that attachment security is the reason someone feels they are flourishing, or that flourishing is the reason someone has attachment security. There are lots of factors playing into both concepts, but their association means that each could influence the other.

Romantic Attachment Security is Associated Too – But It’s Not As Strong

Where your general attachment style is your overarching attachment tendency, your romantic attachment style describes your specific attachments to romantic partners.
We found the following correlations between flourishing and romantic attachment style:

• Flourishing x romantic attachment avoidance: -0.25
• Flourishing x romantic attachment anxiety: -0.30

These are weak to moderate relationships, but they’re interesting nonetheless. These relationships occur in the same direction as general attachment styles: the higher the flourishing scores, the higher the attachment security (or lower the insecurity) scores.

Why could it be that flourishing has a closer link to general attachment styles than romantic attachment styles? Since general attachment styles describe your approach to all attachment relationships, perhaps you are more likely to feel a sense of flourishing when you have lots of secure attachments, versus just a secure romantic attachment. More research would be needed to explore this connection further.

If Attachment Security is Earned, Can Flourishing Follow?

Since they’re connected, it’s possible that working on attachment security could support an increased sense of flourishing. When we build attachment security, we also build mutually supportive relationships and emotional regulation skills, which can contribute to our positive emotion, engagement, sense of meaning, accomplishment, and, of course, relationships.

To learn more about building attachment security, take a look at our toolkits and attachment healing resources.

Conclusion

The Attachment Project’s research on attachment and flourishing, with 23,988 participants from 2024-2026, found moderate negative correlations between general attachment anxiety and flourishing (-0.40) and general attachment avoidance and flourishing (-0.43).

In other words, we found that higher attachment security was related with a greater sense of flourishing. This doesn’t mean that one causes the other, but their relationship means that it’s possible increasing attachment security can increase flourishing. Working on attachment security involves working on things directly related to flourishing, like relationships and a sense of accomplishment, so this makes intuitive sense. With that said, we need more research to understand more about the connection between attachment and flourishing.

Do you know your attachment style? Take our free attachment quiz and get your results straight away.

References

1. Diener E, Wirtz D, Tov W, Kim-Prieto C, Choi DW, Oishi S, Biswas-Diener R. New well-being measures: Short scales to assess flourishing and positive and negative feelings. Social indicators research. 2010 Jun;97(2):143-56.
2. Seligman M. Flourish: Positive psychology and positive interventions. The Tanner lectures on human values. 2010 Oct 7;31(4):1-56.
3. Fraley RC, Heffernan ME, Vicary AM, Brumbaugh CC. The Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structures Questionnaire: a method for assessing attachment orientations across relationships. Psychol Assess. 2011 Sep;23(3):615–25.