AEDI
Attachment and Emotional Dependency Inventory
This exploratory questionnaire describes how a person experiences close relationships, romantic or not: fear of abandonment, need for reassurance and jealousy, a tendency to put oneself last, difficulty being alone or leaving, discomfort with closeness, and a tendency to rely only on oneself. It distinguishes the two dimensions of insecure attachment, anxiety and avoidance, and helps explore emotional dependency or difficulties that repeat from one relationship to the next.
- Number of questions
- 24 questions
- Estimated duration
- 6 minutes
- Language
- English
- Original name
- Attachment and Emotional Dependency Inventory
- Target audience
- Adults
- Exploratory questionnaire
- Exploratory questionnaire
Preview of the 24 questions
Scoring & interpretation
Scoring
Attachment anxiety
| Fear of abandonment and rejection | 11 / 16 |
Fear of being left, neglected, or rejected by the people one cares about, and sensitivity to signs of distance.
Areas to explore: past separations and breakups, the situations that reawaken the fear of being left, what the person does when they feel it.
See also: ECR-R.
| Need for reassurance and jealousy | 9 / 16 |
A need to be reassured of other people's affection, looking for signs of attachment or loss of interest, jealousy.
Areas to explore: requests for reassurance and their effect, checking (messages, social media), jealousy in friendships as well as in romantic relationships.
| Difficulty being alone or leaving | 6 / 16 |
Distress when alone, a need for someone's presence, difficulty leaving a relationship even when it causes suffering.
Areas to explore: going from one relationship straight into the next, relationships kept up despite the suffering, how the person experiences time spent alone.
See also: EDQ, IDI.
| Putting oneself last | 5 / 16 |
Putting the other person's needs and expectations ahead of one's own, to the point of accepting what hurts in order to preserve the bond.
Areas to explore: what the person gives up in their relationships (activities, friends, opinions), what they fear would happen if they stopped, the place of their own needs.
See also: CODAT.
Attachment avoidance
| Discomfort with closeness | 7 / 16 |
Unease with emotional intimacy, confiding, and signs of affection, a need to step back when the bond grows closer.
Areas to explore: the moments when the person pulls away, what they fear about closeness, the effect on those close to them.
See also: ECR-R, FIS.
| Relying only on oneself | 7 / 16 |
Reluctance to lean on others and ask for support, independence put forward as a form of protection.
Areas to explore: experiences in which the person could not count on anyone, what they do alone when things are hard, what they fear about depending on others.
No validated clinical or psychometric cutoffs have been established for this test yet. The results should therefore be considered exploratory indicators, meant to support the clinical interview, not diagnostic findings.
Scoring
Each statement is scored from 0 (never) to 4 (very often) based on its frequency in close relationships. Each domain combines 4 statements spread throughout the questionnaire, giving a score from 0 to 16.
Reading the profile
There is no total score. Within each block, domains are ranked from most to least elevated, each with a description of what it covers and points to explore in the interview. The results show two blocks: attachment anxiety, which brings together the fear of losing the bond and the efforts to keep it (emotional dependency), then attachment avoidance, which describes discomfort with closeness and reluctance to lean on others. A profile elevated in both blocks suggests fearful attachment, in which the need for closeness coexists with the fear that closeness brings.
Clinical cautions
The questionnaire describes relational tendencies and does not assign the person to an attachment style. Elevated "Putting oneself last" or "Difficulty being alone or leaving" domains call for screening in the interview for coercive control or abuse, which the questionnaire does not explore.
Limitations
This exploratory questionnaire has not undergone psychometric validation and has no cutoffs. It supports the clinical interview and does not provide a diagnosis.
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