Neuroticism and Anxious Attachment: Related but Not the Same
Updated: Oct 8
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 30, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Neuroticism and anxious attachment are related psychological constructs, but they are not two names for the same thing. Neuroticism is a broad dimension of personality describing a person's typical proneness to negative emotional states across many areas of life. Anxious attachment is a relationship-focused pattern of insecurity involving concern about rejection, abandonment, availability, or responsiveness from an attachment figure. A person can score high on both, low on both, or show substantially more of one than the other.
This distinction matters because the constructs belong to different measurement traditions and answer different questions. Modern neuroticism research is part of Big Five and Five-Factor personality science. Anxious attachment is studied within adult attachment research and is usually measured alongside attachment avoidance. Their overlap is scientifically meaningful, yet treating one as a proxy for the other loses information about where distress occurs, what triggers it, how stable it is across relationships, and what a particular questionnaire actually measured.
Neither high neuroticism nor anxious attachment is, by itself, a psychiatric diagnosis. They can correlate with psychological distress and with symptoms that also occur in clinical disorders, but trait scores, attachment scores, symptoms, screening results, and diagnoses must remain separate.
The short answer
The best-supported summary is simple: anxious attachment and neuroticism overlap because both involve vulnerability to negative emotion, worry, threat sensitivity, and distress, but anxious attachment is organized around close-relationship security whereas neuroticism is broader. Research using established personality and attachment instruments repeatedly finds a positive association between them without demonstrating that the constructs are interchangeable.
A classic comparison by Noftle and Shaver used dimensional attachment measures together with the Big Five Inventory and the NEO PI-R. The authors found consistent, theoretically meaningful associations between attachment dimensions and Big Five traits, while attachment dimensions still contributed relationship-specific information and predicted relationship quality better than the Big Five measures in their studies (Noftle & Shaver, 2006). Crawford, Shaver, and Goldsmith likewise noted that correlations between anxious attachment and neuroticism were often around .40 to .50 in prior research, then showed that the association was more complex than a simple one-to-one mapping in their college sample (Crawford et al., 2007).
A correlation in this range is substantial enough to explain why the constructs can look similar in everyday life. It is also far below what would be expected if they were merely duplicate labels for the same variable. The remaining nonshared variance matters conceptually and practically.
What neuroticism means in modern personality science
Neuroticism is one of the broad Big Five domains. It describes relatively enduring individual differences in the tendency to experience negative emotions such as worry, sadness, irritability, self-conscious distress, and emotional reactivity. In the BFI-2, the corresponding domain is called Negative Emotionality and is represented through the facets Anxiety, Depression, and Emotional Volatility (Soto & John, 2017). In the NEO PI-R tradition, Neuroticism is represented through six facets: Anxiety, Angry Hostility, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, and Vulnerability.
The broadness of the construct is crucial. A neuroticism measure asks about patterns that can appear in work, health concerns, social situations, performance, daily hassles, close relationships, and many other contexts. Someone who tends to worry intensely about deadlines, health, mistakes, criticism, uncertainty, and interpersonal conflict may score higher on neuroticism even if romantic abandonment is not the central theme of that distress.
The opposite pole is usually described as emotional stability. That does not mean emotional stability is an absence of emotion, and it does not mean higher neuroticism is a disease. Big Five traits are dimensions: people vary continuously rather than dividing naturally into a normal group and a pathological group.
What anxious attachment means
In contemporary adult attachment research, attachment insecurity is commonly represented by two continuous dimensions: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety concerns fears that an attachment figure may be unavailable, rejecting, insufficiently responsive, or likely to leave. Attachment avoidance concerns discomfort with closeness, dependence, or emotional reliance. A person can be high or low on each dimension rather than belonging inevitably to one fixed category.
The Experiences in Close Relationships tradition operationalizes these dimensions with relationship-focused self-report items. Fraley, Waller, and Brennan developed the ECR-R through item-response analyses of adult attachment items, refining measurement of attachment anxiety and avoidance (Fraley et al., 2000). The ECR-R therefore measures something different from a Big Five inventory even when some item content is emotionally similar.
Attachment can also vary by relationship. The ECR-RS was designed to assess attachment orientations across specific relational contexts, such as relationships with a romantic partner, mother, father, or close friend. In a large online sample and a separate validation study, relationship-specific attachment measures carried information beyond a broad global attachment score (Fraley et al., 2011). This relationship specificity is one of the clearest reasons anxious attachment should not be collapsed into neuroticism.
For the broader attachment framework, including anxiety, avoidance, security, intimacy, support, conflict, and communication, see Attachment Styles in Relationships. This article stays with the narrower NTM-083 question: how neuroticism and anxious attachment overlap, where they diverge, and how to interpret evidence connecting them.
Why the two constructs overlap
Shared negative emotionality
Both constructs involve a greater likelihood of distress when something feels threatening or uncertain. A highly neurotic person may be more likely to notice, anticipate, and react strongly to negative possibilities in general. A person high in attachment anxiety may be especially alert to signs that an attachment figure is becoming distant, unavailable, less affectionate, or less committed. The emotional ingredients can therefore overlap even when the psychological target is different.
Worry and threat interpretation
Worry is another point of overlap. Neuroticism includes broad dispositional tendencies toward worry and negative appraisal. Attachment anxiety channels worry toward relationship security: delayed messages, ambiguous tone, changes in closeness, uncertainty about commitment, conflict, or perceived rejection may take on disproportionate significance. This does not establish that neuroticism mechanically produces anxious attachment. It explains why people high on both dimensions can show similar emotional reactions in attachment-relevant situations.
Emotion regulation under interpersonal threat
Crawford and colleagues directly examined whether the link between anxious attachment and neuroticism was moderated by other regulatory characteristics. In their cross-sectional college sample, the association varied with attachment avoidance and conscientiousness, supporting a more conditional relationship than a simple identity between the constructs (Crawford et al., 2007). Because the design was correlational and cross-sectional, it cannot establish a causal pathway from one construct to the other.
Overlap in questionnaire content
Some statistical overlap can also arise because both measurement traditions ask about negatively valenced experience. If one questionnaire assesses frequent worry, emotional upset, or difficulty calming down and another assesses worry about abandonment or partner responsiveness, responses can correlate partly because both depend on self-reported negative affect. That measurement overlap is meaningful, but it is not evidence that the underlying constructs have identical boundaries.
What the research shows directly
The strongest direct evidence for distinguishing the constructs comes from studies that measure both of them. Noftle and Shaver compared attachment anxiety and avoidance with Big Five scores using both the BFI and the NEO PI-R. Attachment anxiety was consistently associated with neuroticism, while the attachment dimensions retained distinctive relationships with relationship quality (Noftle & Shaver, 2006). Their work addressed the precise “jangle” question behind this search intent: whether attachment scales merely rename familiar personality traits. The evidence supported overlap without redundancy.
Fraley and colleagues later showed why the attachment side cannot be understood as a purely person-general emotional trait. The ECR-RS can distinguish a person's attachment orientation toward different relationship figures, and relationship-specific scores tended to predict relationship-specific interpersonal outcomes better than broader attachment scores, whereas broader attachment measures were more closely related to personality traits (Fraley et al., 2011). That pattern is exactly what should be expected if attachment contains both person-level and relationship-specific information.
Dyadic research also separates the constructs. Ben-Ari and Lavee studied 248 married couples, assessing attachment anxiety and avoidance, neuroticism, marital quality, and daily closeness. The results showed that both attachment and neuroticism were relevant to marital functioning, but the dyadic structures formed by the measures were not identical; the authors concluded that attachment security lent itself to dyadic conceptualization more readily than neuroticism (Ben-Ari & Lavee, 2005).
Taken together, these findings support a layered model. Neuroticism captures a broad disposition toward negative emotional experience. Attachment anxiety captures insecurity within the attachment system, especially around relational availability and rejection. The constructs share variance because close relationships are emotionally important and because negative emotionality shapes how threats are noticed and experienced. They remain distinguishable because attachment adds relationship-specific organization, targets, expectations, and patterns of closeness.
Five ways neuroticism and anxious attachment differ
1. Breadth of situations
Neuroticism is domain-general. It can influence emotional responses to health, work, finances, uncertainty, evaluation, mistakes, conflict, and relationships. Anxious attachment is domain-focused: its central concerns involve attachment figures, closeness, responsiveness, abandonment, rejection, and relationship security.
2. What activates the pattern
For neuroticism, a wide variety of stressors can evoke stronger negative affect. For anxious attachment, activation is especially likely when attachment security feels uncertain. A person may therefore appear emotionally stable across work and everyday tasks yet become intensely preoccupied when a romantic relationship feels threatened. The reverse pattern is also possible: someone may be generally worry-prone while feeling relatively secure about a partner's availability.
3. Relationship specificity
Neuroticism is ordinarily modeled as a broad personality trait of the individual. Attachment orientations can be represented globally, but research also supports relationship-specific working models. The ECR-RS evidence shows that a person's attachment anxiety can differ across relationship targets (Fraley et al., 2011). This gives attachment research a level of relational specificity that is not built into a standard neuroticism score.
4. Measurement architecture
NEO, BFI-2, IPIP, and Eysenck measures operationalize personality constructs through different item sets and scoring models. ECR and ECR-R instruments assess attachment anxiety and avoidance. Raw scores, percentiles, and labels are therefore instrument-specific. A high score on one scale cannot be translated mechanically into a score on another, even when constructs correlate.
5. Predictive focus
Because attachment measures ask directly about close relationships, they can outperform broad personality measures for some relationship-specific outcomes. Noftle and Shaver found that attachment dimensions predicted perceived relationship quality better than Big Five measures in their studies (Noftle & Shaver, 2006). This does not make attachment “more important” in general; it shows the value of matching a predictor to the domain of the outcome.
Can someone have one without the other?
Yes. Correlation does not require matching scores within every individual. The most useful way to think about the overlap is probabilistic: higher neuroticism makes higher attachment anxiety more common on average, and higher attachment anxiety is often accompanied by broader negative emotionality, but neither score determines the other.
Higher neuroticism with relatively low attachment anxiety
A person may worry easily, react strongly to stress, or experience frequent negative affect across many domains while still trusting a partner's availability and feeling secure in close relationships. Their emotional vulnerability is broad, but abandonment or relationship uncertainty is not the organizing theme.
Higher attachment anxiety with average or lower neuroticism
A person can function calmly in many areas yet become disproportionately distressed around relational ambiguity, separation, perceived withdrawal, or fear of rejection. Relationship-specific learning and expectations can make attachment concerns much more pronounced than the person's general emotional style would predict.
Higher levels of both
When both dimensions are elevated, broad negative emotionality may amplify the intensity or persistence of attachment-related threat responses. A delayed reply can be both a relationship cue and one more ambiguous event interpreted through a general tendency toward worry. This combination can produce strong overlap in observable behavior without making the constructs identical.
Lower levels of both
Lower neuroticism and lower attachment anxiety can coexist as general emotional stability plus confidence in attachment availability. Again, these are dimensional descriptions, not personality categories and not indicators of mental-health status.
Does neuroticism cause anxious attachment?
Current evidence does not justify a simple one-way statement that neuroticism causes anxious attachment, or that anxious attachment causes neuroticism. Much of the literature relating the two constructs is correlational. Shared developmental influences, temperament, personality development, relationship experiences, measurement overlap, and reciprocal processes can all contribute to their association.
Behavioral-genetic research illustrates the complexity. In a study of middle-aged men, Franz and colleagues found shared genetic covariance among adult attachment dimensions, depressive symptoms, and negative emotionality, while also finding measure-specific genetic influences and complex unique-environment correlations. The authors explicitly treated attachment dimensions as partly overlapping yet distinguishable from negative emotionality (Franz et al., 2011). Group-level genetic covariance does not provide a biological diagnosis, does not show a single “attachment gene,” and cannot predict an individual's attachment pattern from a personality score.
Developmental interpretation therefore needs multiple levels. Temperamental differences may influence how intensely a person experiences threat or frustration. Repeated relationship experiences may shape expectations about whether others will be available or rejecting. Current relationships can reinforce or challenge those expectations. Personality itself also develops across the life span. A convincing causal model would have to separate these processes over time rather than infer causation from a single cross-sectional correlation.
How both constructs relate to relationship quality
Neuroticism has a robust average association with lower romantic relationship quality, but the effect is probabilistic rather than deterministic. A 2025 meta-analysis by Esplin and colleagues synthesized 148 published studies and found an overall correlation of r = −.238 between neuroticism and relationship quality. Male and female actor and partner correlations were similar, while region, measurement tool, participant age, and relationship duration moderated the association (Esplin et al., 2025).
That meta-analysis is important for NTM-083 because it establishes the broad relationship relevance of neuroticism without turning relationship outcomes into an attachment measure. A lower average relationship-quality correlation does not tell us whether a particular person has anxious attachment, how secure a specific partnership is, or which process is operating in a given couple.
Attachment insecurity has its own outcome literature. A meta-analysis of 224 studies found that attachment anxiety and avoidance were associated with more negative and less positive indicators of mental health, with attachment anxiety generally showing larger associations than avoidance (Zhang et al., 2022). Those findings do not convert attachment anxiety into a psychiatric disorder. They show that relationship insecurity is statistically connected to well-being and distress across samples.
In couples, actor and partner processes also matter. One person's emotional reactivity can affect their own perception of the relationship, their partner's experience, and the interaction between them. But population-level actor or partner effects do not mean a dissatisfied relationship can be reduced to one person's personality. Relationship quality is dyadic, contextual, and shaped by many variables that sit outside any single trait score.
Neuroticism, attachment anxiety, and clinical anxiety are three different levels
The word anxiety appears in several psychological constructs, which creates predictable confusion. Neuroticism includes proneness to negative emotion and worry as part of a broad personality domain. Attachment anxiety refers specifically to anxiety about attachment security. Clinical anxiety symptoms describe experiences such as excessive fear, worry, physiological arousal, avoidance, or impairment that may or may not meet criteria for an anxiety disorder after clinical assessment.
These levels can correlate strongly without becoming equivalent. A person can have a high attachment-anxiety score without an anxiety-disorder diagnosis. A person can meet criteria for an anxiety disorder without having especially high romantic attachment anxiety. A high neuroticism score can be a statistical vulnerability factor for distress while remaining a personality-trait result rather than a diagnosis.
This distinction also protects against circular interpretation. If someone reports worry in a relationship, it does not follow that the person is high in neuroticism. If a Big Five test reports high neuroticism, it does not establish anxious attachment. If an attachment questionnaire reports high anxiety, it does not diagnose generalized anxiety disorder, depression, OCD, PTSD, a personality disorder, or any other psychiatric condition.
How neuroticism and anxious attachment are measured
NEO PI-R and NEO-FFI
The NEO PI-R measures Neuroticism as one of five broad personality domains and provides six neuroticism facets in the full instrument. The NEO-FFI is shorter and provides domain-level scores rather than the same full facet profile. A score is interpretable only within the instrument's scoring system and reference framework; the same raw total cannot be treated as a universal quantity across NEO versions, languages, or populations.
BFI-2 Negative Emotionality
The BFI-2 uses the label Negative Emotionality for the Big Five domain corresponding closely to neuroticism and assesses Anxiety, Depression, and Emotional Volatility as facets (Soto & John, 2017). A BFI-2 Negative Emotionality score should not be described as if it were a NEO PI-R Neuroticism score. The instruments sample the personality domain differently.
IPIP and Eysenck measures
IPIP-based inventories can measure Big Five neuroticism with public-domain item sets of different lengths. Eysenck instruments measure Neuroticism within the Eysenck personality model rather than the Big Five architecture. Scores can correlate across systems, but identical labels do not make scales interchangeable.
ECR and ECR-R
The ECR family assesses adult attachment primarily along anxiety and avoidance dimensions. Fraley, Waller, and Brennan's item-response work produced the ECR-R as a refined measure of these dimensions (Fraley et al., 2000). It is a relationship-attachment instrument, not a general personality test and not a clinical diagnostic interview.
ECR-RS
The ECR-RS allows attachment anxiety and avoidance to be assessed with respect to different relationship figures (Fraley et al., 2011). This makes it especially useful when the scientific question concerns whether insecurity is general or tied more strongly to one relationship context.
Why a “high score” is not universal
There is no universal numerical threshold at which neuroticism becomes “high” across all personality tests, and there is no universal attachment-anxiety cutoff that applies across all instruments and populations. Interpretation depends on the questionnaire, scoring direction, scale range, normative sample, age or population characteristics, language version, and whether the result is a raw score, standardized score, percentile, or categorical summary created by a specific service.
A percentile answers a reference-group question: how a score compares with a particular norm sample. It does not measure disease severity. A raw score answers even less without the scoring manual. A website label such as “high neuroticism” or “anxious attachment style” may be based on a proprietary cutoff that is not equivalent to a research instrument's interpretation.
For comparisons between neuroticism and anxious attachment, instrument names should always be reported. “Neuroticism correlated with attachment anxiety” is incomplete if the underlying scales are unknown because effect sizes can vary with measurement choices, a point also reflected in the moderator findings of the neuroticism–relationship-quality meta-analysis.
What anxious attachment adds beyond neuroticism
Anxious attachment adds relational content: whose availability matters, what kind of rejection is feared, what closeness means to the person, and how uncertainty about an attachment bond is represented. These concerns can generate behaviors such as monitoring, seeking reassurance, escalating bids for closeness, or becoming preoccupied with relational ambiguity. Those behaviors are not required features of high neuroticism.
Attachment research also distinguishes anxiety from avoidance. Two people with similar levels of attachment anxiety can differ greatly in avoidance, producing different patterns around intimacy and dependence. Neuroticism alone does not supply this second attachment dimension. This is another reason why translating a Big Five score directly into an attachment “style” is psychometrically unsound.
Finally, attachment measures can be tailored to a specific relationship. A person may feel secure with a long-term partner and less secure with a parent, former partner, or close friend. General neuroticism may contribute to emotional intensity across these situations, but it does not specify the attachment representation attached to each relationship.
What neuroticism adds beyond anxious attachment
Neuroticism adds breadth. It captures emotional vulnerability outside the attachment domain and therefore helps explain why the same person may also be more reactive to occupational stress, uncertainty, criticism, health worries, setbacks, or everyday frustration. A relationship-focused attachment score does not fully represent that broader emotional disposition.
This distinction becomes visible when a relationship is going well. A person high in neuroticism may still experience substantial worry or negative affect in nonrelational domains even when attachment security is not threatened. Conversely, reducing uncertainty in a relationship may calm attachment-specific distress while leaving the person's broader tendency toward negative emotionality relatively unchanged.
The practical implication is measurement matching: ask a personality question with a validated personality measure and an attachment question with a validated attachment measure. Combining them can be informative; substituting one for the other is not.
Common interpretation mistakes
Calling anxious attachment “just neuroticism”
This erases relationship specificity and the avoidance dimension, and it conflicts with studies showing unique predictive information from attachment measures after accounting for Big Five traits.
Calling high neuroticism an attachment disorder
Neuroticism is a personality dimension. High scores can be associated with distress or with insecure attachment, but they do not define an attachment disorder or any other psychiatric diagnosis.
Assuming correlation proves developmental causation
A positive correlation between neuroticism and anxious attachment does not reveal whether temperament shaped later attachment, relationship experiences shaped later personality, common factors shaped both, or reciprocal processes operated over time. Cross-sectional data are especially limited for causal claims.
Treating self-report labels as fixed identities
Both personality and attachment measures summarize patterns, not essences. Scores contain measurement error, can vary with context and instrument, and should be interpreted at the level the measure was designed to assess.
Using one partner's score to explain the whole relationship
Relationship quality is not the output of a single trait. Dyadic research shows actor and partner processes, and meta-analytic evidence shows heterogeneity and moderators. A trait score can contribute information without becoming a verdict on who is responsible for relationship difficulties.
Practical implications for self-understanding and relationships
If you are trying to understand your own pattern, start by separating general emotional reactivity from attachment-specific threat. Ask whether worry and distress occur across many domains or rise sharply around closeness, delayed responses, conflict, commitment, separation, or perceived rejection. The answer is descriptive rather than diagnostic, but it can clarify which construct better matches a particular experience.
It is also useful to notice whether the pattern changes across relationships. If attachment anxiety is much stronger with one partner or one type of relationship, relationship-specific expectations and interaction patterns may be especially relevant. If distress is pervasive across unrelated areas of life, a broad personality or mental-health assessment may provide different information.
In a relationship, the most productive interpretation is usually process-focused rather than label-focused. “I become highly alarmed when contact suddenly drops” is more actionable than “I am neurotic.” “I need reassurance after unresolved conflict” identifies a relational process more precisely than a global personality judgment. Specific descriptions make room for communication, boundary setting, emotion regulation, and observation of the actual interaction.
If anxiety, low mood, intrusive thoughts, avoidance, sleep disruption, or other symptoms are intense, persistent, or impairing, they deserve assessment on their own terms. Neither a neuroticism result nor an attachment-style result can determine whether a clinical disorder is present.
Change should also be measured at the right level. A reduction in relationship anxiety after a safer relationship experience is not automatically evidence that broad neuroticism changed. Lower psychiatric symptom severity is not automatically trait change. Conversely, personality-trait change does not prove that attachment representations toward a particular partner changed. Studies and clinicians need repeated, construct-specific measures to distinguish these outcomes.
What the evidence cannot tell you about one individual
Population studies estimate average patterns. Even a reliable correlation does not determine why a specific person worries about a partner, whether a relationship is healthy, whether a partner is actually unreliable, or whether a person's response is disproportionate to the situation. Anxious reactions can occur in genuinely unstable relationships; relationship context should not be erased by attributing every concern to personality.
Likewise, neuroticism is not a moral judgment. Higher scores are associated statistically with greater negative emotionality, but they do not establish weakness, irrationality, incompatibility, or incapacity for a satisfying relationship. The 2025 relationship-quality meta-analysis describes an average association across studies, not a destiny for couples.
Attachment labels also should not be used to invalidate concrete evidence. If someone fears abandonment because a partner repeatedly threatens to leave, the external situation matters. Psychological constructs help organize patterns; they do not replace examination of what is happening in the relationship.
Research limitations to keep in mind
Much of the literature relies on self-report questionnaires, which can inflate associations when two measures share negative wording, introspective style, or response tendencies. Measurement choice matters: BFI, NEO, IPIP, Eysenck, ECR, ECR-R, and ECR-RS scales differ in content and structure. Results should therefore be attached to the instruments actually used.
Many foundational studies used student, Western, or heterosexual samples, and some dyadic studies focused on married couples. Later work has broadened populations, but generalization still depends on sample composition. An effect measured in one age group, culture, relationship stage, or sexual-orientation group should not be presented as an invariant human law.
Longitudinal evidence is especially important when the question is directionality. The Esplin meta-analysis found that cross-sectional versus longitudinal classification did not moderate the neuroticism–relationship-quality association, but this does not turn the association into proof of causation (Esplin et al., 2025). Longitudinal designs improve temporal inference, yet causal conclusions still depend on design quality, measurement, confounding, and the specific process under study.
FAQ
Is anxious attachment a form of neuroticism?
No. Attachment anxiety correlates with neuroticism, but it is a distinct construct centered on security in close relationships. Neuroticism is a broader personality dimension spanning many contexts.
Are people with high neuroticism usually anxiously attached?
They are more likely on average to score higher on attachment anxiety, but individual combinations vary widely. Correlation does not let you infer an individual's attachment score from a neuroticism score.
Can someone be anxiously attached but emotionally stable in other areas?
Yes. Attachment insecurity can be relatively relationship-specific. A person can function with comparatively low negative emotionality across many domains yet become highly distressed when an attachment bond feels uncertain.
Can someone be highly neurotic but securely attached?
Yes. Broad proneness to worry or negative affect does not require fears of partner abandonment or rejection. The constructs overlap statistically without determining one another.
Does anxious attachment mean I have an anxiety disorder?
No. Attachment anxiety is a relationship construct, not a psychiatric diagnosis. Clinical anxiety disorders require condition-specific assessment of symptoms, duration, impairment, and other diagnostic considerations.
Which test can tell the difference?
Use construct-specific instruments. Big Five or Five-Factor measures such as the BFI-2 or NEO inventories assess neuroticism or Negative Emotionality. ECR-family measures assess attachment anxiety and avoidance. A single test should not be made to answer both questions unless it was explicitly validated to do so.
What does a high ECR-R attachment-anxiety score mean?
It means higher endorsement of attachment-anxiety content within that instrument. Interpretation depends on the exact version, scoring method, reference sample, and population. It does not by itself diagnose a mental disorder or establish a universal attachment category.
Does neuroticism explain why anxious attachment affects relationships?
It may account for part of the shared vulnerability to negative emotion, but evidence does not support reducing attachment processes to neuroticism. Attachment measures retain relationship-specific information and can predict relational outcomes beyond broad personality traits.
Can both neuroticism and anxious attachment change?
Both are capable of variation over time, but change must be measured separately. A change in attachment anxiety is not automatically a change in neuroticism, and a reduction in psychiatric symptoms is not automatically change in either trait.
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References
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