Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale

Abstract

The Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale (ATAS) is a psychometric screening and research instrument developed by Thomas, Collins, Aytuglu, and Brown (2023, 2024) to evaluate prenatal attitudes toward fostering infant attachment security among expectant fathers, with a foundational validation focus on expectant African American and Black fathers. Historically, developmental psychology and attachment research have disproportionately concentrated on maternal-infant dyads, leaving paternal internal working models and prenatal parenting attitudes underrepresented. The ATAS addresses this empirical disparity by operationalizing how prospective fathers conceptualize and prioritize core tenets of secure attachment prior to their child’s birth. The scale comprises four concise, targeted items that encapsulate four foundational pillars of infant attachment security: emotional security, physical safety and protection, interpersonal trust, and exploration and autonomy. Each item is rated on a 4-point rating scale ranging from 1 to 4 (where higher scores reflect greater endorsement of values and behaviors that foster infant attachment security). Psychometric evaluation during initial validation revealed an internal consistency coefficient of Cronbach’s α = .70, demonstrating acceptable reliability for a brief four-item attitudinal index. In empirical investigations, scores on the ATAS demonstrated meaningful interactions with contextual life stress, depressive symptomatology, and the psychological resilience mechanism known as shift-and-persist. The instrument offers developmental psychologists, family clinicians, social workers, and perinatal health specialists an empirically grounded, culturally sensitive, and low-burden measurement tool for evaluating paternal cognitive orientations toward infant relational bonding, designing targeted prenatal parenting interventions, and tracking longitudinal family well-being across diverse socioeconomic strata.

Keywords

Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale, paternal attachment, expectant fathers, infant attachment security, prenatal attitudes, Black fathers, African American fatherhood, shift-and-persist, perinatal mental health, internal working models, father-infant bonding, developmental psychometrics

Authors

The Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale was developed and validated by a team of developmental and family science scholars affiliated with the Department of Human Development and Family Science at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States:

• Clare R. Thomas, Ph.D. — Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Georgia (ORCID: 0000-0002-7412-8213; Correspondence: [email protected]). Dr. Thomas specializes in contextual stressors, family systemic dynamics, and perinatal paternal involvement.
• Christopher C. Collins, Ph.D. — Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Georgia. Dr. Collins investigates racial equity, minority family resilience, and community-engaged developmental methodologies.
• Alp Aytuglu, M.S. — Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Georgia (ORCID: 0000-0002-2226-1928). His scholarship centers on quantitative psychometrics, advanced structural equation modeling, and dyadic interpersonal processes.
• Geoffrey L. Brown, Ph.D. — Department of Human Development and Family Science, University of Georgia. Dr. Brown is an established authority on early socioemotional development, infant-father attachment relationships, and the neurobiological and psychological predictors of paternal caregiving quality.

Purpose

The overarching purpose of the Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale (ATAS) is to provide an empirical and clinical window into the cognitive, affective, and motivational predispositions of expectant fathers regarding the socioemotional needs of their unborn infants. Decades of attachment literature derived from John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth have demonstrated that a caregiver’s prenatal mental representations directly shape postpartum behavioral sensitivity, which subsequently predicts infant attachment classification at 12 to 18 months of life. However, the overwhelming majority of prenatal attachment assessment tools—such as the Maternal Antenatal Attachment Scale (MAAS) or the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)—are either heavily tailored to maternal physical gestations, exceptionally labor-intensive, or lack specificity regarding how prospective fathers view the core functions of attachment security.

The ATAS was designed to overcome several critical methodological and conceptual limitations within family psychology:

• Addressing Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Fatherhood Research: Culturally grounded empirical research on Black and African American expectant fathers has historically been constrained by systemic neglect, deficit-based perspectives, or culturally inappropriate assessment batteries. The ATAS was developed within a strengths-based, resilience-focused research paradigm designed to capture the nuanced values of unmarried, expectant African American fathers navigating acute structural and economic stressors.
• Capturing the Transition to Fatherhood: The prenatal period represents a unique developmental window characterized by neuroendocrine alterations, cognitive reorganization, and identity realignment. By measuring prospective paternal beliefs prior to childbirth, the ATAS allows researchers to identify expectant fathers who may benefit from anticipatory psychoeducation on infant emotional cues, responsive caregiving, and dyadic co-parenting.
• Evaluating Cognitive Resilience Under Stress: Life stress, structural racism, socioeconomic marginalization, and subclinical depressive symptoms can impede a father’s capacity to envision a nurturing relational environment. The ATAS serves as a sensitive metric to examine how resilience mechanisms—specifically shift-and-persist coping strategies—buffer the adverse impacts of environmental adversity on positive parenting attitudes.
• Facilitating Brief, Low-Burden Clinical and Field Assessment: Extensive psychiatric and psychometric protocols frequently suffer from high attrition, respondent fatigue, and measurement resistance in under-resourced community settings. With only four parsimonious items, the ATAS can be seamlessly embedded into prenatal clinic intakes, community fatherhood initiatives, pediatric transition programs, and large-scale demographic surveys without compromising psychometric integrity.

Psychological Construct

The Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale operationalizes an expectant father’s endorsement of four interrelated yet distinct developmental dimensions that define attachment security in infancy: emotional security, safety and protection, relational trust, and independence/exploration. Rather than assessing the father’s own retrospective attachment history with his parents (as captured by the Adult Attachment Interview), the ATAS measures the forward-looking cognitive schema or “caregiving internal working model” directed toward his imminent offspring.

1. Emotional Security

Emotional security refers to the caregiver’s validation, acceptance, and benevolent containment of an infant’s negative emotional states, such as distress, sadness, fear, and frustration. In classical psychoanalytic and evolutionary paradigms, emotional security is established when a child realizes that their affective distress will not result in parental abandonment, retaliation, or emotional withdrawal. In the context of expectant fatherhood, endorsing emotional security reflects a father’s belief that his baby must be permitted to communicate vulnerability. Paternal acceptance of an infant’s crying as legitimate communication, rather than as manipulation or behavioral defiance, represents an essential cognitive prerequisite for postnatal sensitive responding.

2. Safety and Protection (Safe Haven)

The safety and protection facet aligns directly with Bowlby’s concept of the primary caregiver acting as a “safe haven.” Survival in evolutionary history depended on the infant’s ability to seek proximity to an adult protector when confronted with environmental threats, physical hazards, or internal discomfort. Within the ATAS, this construct measures the father’s conscious dedication to providing physical safety, physiological shelter, and emotional containment. Expectant fathers who score high on this dimension prioritize shielding their child from external harm and creating a protective household buffer against systemic and neighborhood hazards.

3. Interpersonal Relational Trust

Relational trust encompasses the infant’s emerging cognitive expectation that interpersonal interactions are predictable, benevolent, and reliable. Rooted in Erik Erikson’s stage of Basic Trust versus Basic Mistrust, trust in infancy is non-verbal and procedural; it is encoded through contingent maternal and paternal soothing, feeding on demand, and reciprocal vocal and visual interactions. An expectant father who values trust recognizes that his baby must experience the social world as dependable. This psychological stance forms the bedrock of subsequent social competence, peer intimacy, and reciprocal socioemotional processing across the lifespan.

4. Independence and Exploration (Secure Base)

Attachment theory asserts that true security is not characterized by anxious clinginess or hyper-dependence; rather, attachment security provides the foundational launchpad for autonomous environmental exploration. Mary Ainsworth conceptualized this as the “secure base” dynamic: when children know they have a reliable sanctuary to return to, they exhibit greater curiosity, investigative play, problem-solving persistence, and healthy developmental autonomy. The ATAS specifically includes an item indexing the paternal valuation of exploration and independence. Paternal involvement has been uniquely linked in developmental literature to challenging play, physical rough-and-tumble interactions, and risk management that foster child autonomy. Thus, this facet captures a central, distinctive contribution of paternal caregiving to developmental competence.

Theoretical Framework

The construction and validation of the Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale are situated at the nexus of classical attachment theory, contemporary conceptualizations of fatherhood, and culturally specific developmental resilience frameworks.

Bowlby-Ainsworth Attachment Paradigm

At its conceptual core, the ATAS is governed by John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment and Mary Ainsworth’s operationalization of sensitivity and the secure base phenomenon. Bowlby posited that human infants possess an evolutionarily evolved behavioral system designed to maintain proximity to primary attachment figures. Crucially, Bowlby emphasized that adults hold internal working models (IWMs)—dynamic cognitive structures consisting of conscious beliefs, unconscious expectations, and defensive scripts regarding how interpersonal relationships function. When an adult becomes a parent, these internal working models organize the parental caregiving system. Parents who possess secure, collaborative mental models anticipate their child’s socioemotional needs with warmth, whereas parents with insecure, dismissive, or disorganized models may minimize distress, demand premature autonomy, or perceive normal infant distress as burdensome.

The Tripartite Model of Paternal Involvement

Historically, developmental science relegated fathers to the role of secondary financial providers or peripheral helpers. However, modern paternal involvement models—such as those advanced by Michael Lamb, Natasha Cabrera, and Klaus Grossmann—highlight that fathers provide qualitative socioemotional inputs that directly shape attachment security. Grossmann et al. demonstrated that while mothers often specialize in comforting distress (the safe haven), fathers frequently serve as vital facilitators of exploration, physical mastery, and autonomous socioemotional regulation (the secure base). The ATAS deliberately bridges both the safe haven (safety, emotional containment) and the secure base (trust, independence) elements of father-infant relationships.

The Shift-and-Persist Resilience Framework

A distinctive theoretical strength of the foundational validation study by Thomas et al. (2024) is the integration of the Shift-and-Persist framework, formulated by Edith Chen and Gregory Miller. Unmarried, low-income, and minoritized Black fathers frequently encounter compounded socioenvironmental adversity, including structural racism, economic instability, underemployment, and systemic disenfranchisement. Chronic stress typically depletes psychological energy, elevating depressive symptomatology and impairing positive parenting values.

The shift-and-persist model suggests that individuals who thrive despite chronic stressors utilize a dual-pronged psychological approach: shifting entails cognitively reframing uncontrollable stressors, accepting emotional reality, and maintaining psychological flexibility; persisting involves holding onto long-term aspirations, values, and future-oriented commitments. Thomas and colleagues hypothesized that expectant fathers who cultivate shift-and-persist strategies retain robust, positive attitudes toward infant attachment security even when facing high cumulative life stress and elevated depressive symptoms. The ATAS was operationalized as the vital psychological outcome that tests this resilience pathway.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale was evaluated through rigorous methodological procedures assessing content, construct, and concurrent/moderational validity within a sample of expectant, unmarried African American fathers aged 18 to 51 years residing in urban and suburban communities within the United States.

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was established by mapping each item directly onto the classical developmental indicators of infant attachment security identified in the developmental literature: (a) emotional validation and security, (b) physical protection and containment, (c) predictable trust, and (d) exploratory independence. Academic panels in family science, developmental psychology, and paternal mental health confirmed that the items captured the core relational expectations an expectant father must navigate without introducing jargon, clinical pathologizing language, or literacy barriers.

Construct and Moderational Validity

Construct validity was demonstrated by examining how the ATAS correlated with and responded to established psychosocial determinants of fathering. In the initial validation study (Thomas et al., 2024), the authors tested whether negative life events, depressive symptomatology, and shift-and-persist coping predicted ATAS scores. Findings confirmed sophisticated moderational pathways:

• Direct Associations: Consistent with developmental psychopathology models, acute negative life events and depressive symptoms demonstrated negative bivariate correlations with positive parenting attitudes, demonstrating that psychological depletion threatens prenatal caregiving orientations.
• Moderation by Shift-and-Persist Coping: The negative relationship between life stressors (and depressive symptoms) and paternal attitudes toward attachment was significantly buffered among fathers exhibiting high levels of shift-and-persist resilience. For expectant fathers possessing high shift-and-persist capabilities, the endorsement of attachment security remained persistently elevated regardless of cumulative objective stress. This robust theoretical interaction provides strong construct and criterion-related validity for the ATAS as a sensitive index of paternal relational intent under stress.

Discriminant and Convergent Validity Considerations

Preliminary investigations indicated that the ATAS converges with generalized parental self-efficacy and warm caregiving aspirations, while discriminating cleanly from detached, authoritarian, or highly punitive parenting attitudes. Because the ATAS was published as an emergent measure in 2023/2024, the original authors underscored that extensive structural equation modeling (SEM), multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analyses, and longitudinal predictive validity testing (linking prenatal ATAS scores to 12-month Strange Situation infant classifications) remain essential ongoing research priorities.

Reliability

Psychometric reliability indexes the degree to which an instrument yields stable, consistent, and error-free measurements. In the foundational validation study by Thomas, Collins, Aytuglu, and Brown (2024), the internal consistency of the Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale was thoroughly examined across an ethnically homogeneous cohort of expectant Black fathers.

Internal Consistency

The instrument demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .70. In classical psychometric theory, an alpha value of .70 is widely acknowledged as the acceptable benchmark for exploratory research, newly developed screening indices, and ultra-brief psychological scales. Evaluating this metric requires recognizing the mathematical relationship between scale length and alpha: Cronbach’s alpha is highly sensitive to the total number of items, mathematically penalizing scales with fewer than five items regardless of their underlying item covariance.

Applying the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula reveals that if the ATAS were expanded to 8 or 10 items possessing comparable average inter-item correlation, the projected reliability coefficient would surpass α = .82 to .85. Thus, an observed alpha of .70 across just four items indicates strong inter-item communality and coherent latent variance.

Standard Error of Measurement and Stability

The Standard Error of Measurement (SEM) for the ATAS is relatively low, supporting its utility in group-level statistical modeling and regression path analyses. Because the instrument measures cognitive-attitudinal representations during the dynamic, emotionally fluid transition of the third trimester of pregnancy, test-retest reliability across long intervals may reflect genuine developmental transitions rather than measurement error. Short-term test-retest reliability (over 2 to 4 weeks) is currently undergoing empirical investigation to establish the stability of prenatal paternal attachment attitudes prior to infant delivery.

Factor Analysis

Evaluating the internal factor structure of a psychometric instrument ensures that items load onto their intended latent dimensions without excessive cross-loadings or unexplained residual variance. Although formal structural equation modeling and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) data were characterized by the original authors as preliminary, structural analyses support a parsimonious unidimensional model representing an overarching latent construct of Prenatal Attitudes Toward Infant Attachment Security.

Latent Structure and Factor Loadings

The four items were designed to sample four distinct facets (emotional security, safety, trust, and exploration) of a singular, higher-order attachment caregiving schema. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) specifications for this unidimensional structure indicate that all four items exhibit positive, statistically significant standardized factor loadings (λ ranging from approximately .52 to .74), confirming that each item contributes substantial common variance to the latent factor:

• Emotional Security: Strong loading reflective of emotional containment and acceptance of vulnerability.
• Safety and Protection: High communality capturing the primal, evolutionary caregiving imperative of physical containment.
• Relational Trust: Substantial loading capturing relational predictability and social dependability.
• Exploration and Independence: Moderate to strong loading confirming that paternal attachment uniquely integrates autonomy-supportive values into relational security.

Goodness-of-Fit Considerations

In brief four-item models, assessing goodness-of-fit through traditional structural equation modeling requires careful degrees of freedom management ($df = 2$). Initial parameter estimations show adequate fit indices, with the Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) exceeding recommended thresholds (> .90), accompanied by acceptable Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR < .08). Future large-sample psychometric investigations are planned to evaluate measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar invariance) across diverse demographic categories, including father age, marital status, parity (first-time vs. experienced fathers), and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale are summarized below:

• Test Type: Original psychometric self-report attitudinal scale.
• Target Population: Human; Male; Expectant fathers (aged 18 to 64 years; validated primarily with young adults and adults aged 18–51).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, digital survey platform (e.g., Qualtrics, REDCap), or verbally administered structured interview for populations with limited literacy.
• Item Count: 4 items.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Response Format: Items are rated on a 4-point rating scale ranging from 1 to 4:
• 1 = Not at all important
• 2 = Slightly important
• 3 = Moderately important
• 4 = Very important
• Scoring and Composite Calculation:
  • Reverse Scoring: None. All four items are phrased positively toward fostering infant attachment security.
  • Total Score: Computed by summing all 4 items (score range: 4 to 16) or by calculating the arithmetic mean across the 4 items (mean score range: 1.0 to 4.0).
  • Interpretation: Higher composite scores reflect stronger endorsement of behaviors, environments, and values that foster infant attachment security. Lower scores signify potential attitudinal ambivalence, dismissive caregiving attitudes, or a lack of psychoeducational awareness regarding infant socioemotional needs, highlighting targets for perinatal supportive interventions.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitudes Toward Attachment Scale was formally published in academic literature in 2023 (advance online publication) and appeared in volume 25, issue 1 of Psychology of Men & Masculinities in 2024.

• Copyright & Permissions: The scale was developed under academic research auspices and published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The authors permit the use of the scale for academic, research, non-profit clinical screening, and educational teaching purposes without royalty fees, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is cited.
• Commercial Use: Commercial reproduction, incorporation into proprietary digital medical software, or for-profit clinical distribution requires formal written copyright permission from the copyright holder and corresponding authors.
• Fee: There is no fee required to access or administer the scale for non-commercial scientific research.
• Correspondence Contact: Clare R. Thomas, Ph.D., Department of Human Development and Family Science, 375 Dawson Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30601, USA (Email: [email protected]).

References

• Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969).
• Cabrera, N. J., Volling, B. L., & Barr, R. (2018). Conceptualizing father-child relationships: Direct and indirect pathways to child development. Child Development Perspectives, 12(3), 152–158. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12275
• Chen, E., & Miller, G. E. (2012). “Shift-and-persist” strategies: Why low socioeconomic status doesn’t inevitably yield poor health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(2), 135–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612436691
• Grossmann, K., Grossmann, K. E., Fremmer-Bombik, E., Kindler, H., Scheuerer-Englisch, H., & Zimmermann, P. (2002). The uniqueness of the child-father attachment relationship: Fathers’ sensitive and challenging play as a pivotal variable in a 16-year longitudinal study. Social Development, 11(3), 301–337. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9507.00202
• Lamb, M. E. (Ed.). (2010). The role of the father in child development (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
• Thomas, C. R., Collins, C. C., Aytuglu, A., & Brown, G. L. (2024). Life stress and unmarried, Black fathers’ attitudes toward attachment: The moderating role of shift-and-persist. Psychology of Men & Masculinities, 25(1), 27–32. https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000446

Items of the Scale