1. Abstract
The Fear of Intimacy Scale (FIS) is a widely utilized 35-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess an individual’s anxiety and inhibitions regarding the exchange of personal, emotionally significant information in close, romantic, or dating relationships. Developed and validated by psychologists Carol J. Descutner and Mark H. Thelen at the University of Missouri in 1991, the instrument operationalizes fear of intimacy as the inhibited capacity of an individual—stemming directly from relational anxiety—to share personal thoughts, vulnerabilities, and feelings with an open, highly valued partner. The scale is partitioned structurally into two operational sections: Part A (comprising 30 items) evaluates the respondent’s anticipated cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions within an imagined or ongoing close dating relationship with a significant other (denoted systematically as "O"); Part B (comprising 5 items) appraises historical relational behaviors and behavioral tendencies manifested in past interpersonal partnerships.
Respondents evaluate each statement along a 5-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 ("Not at all characteristic of me") to 5 ("Extremely characteristic of me"). Fifteen positively keyed items are reverse-scored, resulting in a continuous composite index spanning from 35 to 175, wherein higher aggregate scores reflect greater degrees of intimacy-related anxiety, defensiveness, and interpersonal avoidance. Psychometric evaluations across diverse collegiate, adult, and clinical samples consistently demonstrate exceptional reliability, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between .91 and .93, alongside robust test-retest stability coefficients over one-month intervals ($r = .89$). Factor-analytic investigations confirm a dominant general factor capturing the core construct of intimacy anxiety, alongside multidimensional facets that capture fear of emotional exposure, dread of engulfment, and apprehension regarding vulnerability. The scale exhibits strong construct, convergent, and discriminant validity through significant associations with measures of adult attachment avoidance, chronic loneliness, depressive symptomatology, relational duration, and clinician-rated client interpersonal avoidance.
2. Keywords
Fear of Intimacy Scale, FIS, adult attachment, self-disclosure, interpersonal anxiety, romantic relationships, emotional intimacy, psychometrics, relational avoidance, vulnerability
3. Authors
The Fear of Intimacy Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and empirically validated by Carol J. Descutner, Ph.D., and Mark H. Thelen, Ph.D. The validation research was conducted at the Department of Psychology, University of Missouri-Columbia, Missouri, United States. Dr. Mark H. Thelen was an esteemed Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, known internationally for his research in clinical psychology, interpersonal functioning, body image, eating disorders, and relational barriers. Inquiries regarding original normative derivations or historical research rights are linked to academic archives of the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
4. Purpose
Interpersonal intimacy represents a cornerstone of human psychological well-being, psychological flourishing, and adaptive social functioning. However, substantial subsets of clinical and non-clinical populations exhibit profound resistance to relational vulnerability, experiencing intense apprehension when confronting prospects of mutual emotional transparency. Descutner and Thelen designed the Fear of Intimacy Scale (FIS) to provide clinicians, personality researchers, and marital therapists with a standardized, objective, and psychometrically sound assessment tool specifically calibrated to quantify internal barriers to relational closeness.
Prior to the formalization of the FIS in 1991, clinical appraisals of intimacy fears were largely confined to projective assessments, broad-band social anxiety inventories, or non-standardized interview protocols. These earlier approaches frequently failed to decouple generic social evaluative anxiety (such as performance fears or broad social phobia) from the distinct intrapsychic dread evoked when entering high-stakes, dyadic romantic bonds. The FIS resolved this methodological deficit by targeting the explicit construct of intimacy within close dating dyads, isolating the particular vulnerability associated with being deeply known, accepted, or rejected by an attachment figure.
In applied clinical contexts, the FIS serves multiple essential functions:
- Diagnostic Clarification: Assisting clinicians in differentiating between generic generalized social anxiety disorder, avoidant personality structures, and specific romantic or attachment-related inhibitions.
- Individual and Couples Psychotherapy: Identifying core client defenses, such as emotional withdrawal, withholding of distress, or preemptive relationship termination, enabling clinicians to tailor interventions that systematically build tolerance for emotional vulnerability.
- Treatment Progress and Outcome Tracking: Providing a sensitive, continuous measure capable of detecting shifts in a client’s comfort with closeness over the course of psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, or emotionally focused therapies (EFT).
- Empirical Relationship Research: Facilitating large-scale investigative inquiries into the transmission of intergenerational trauma, the downstream correlates of insecure romantic attachment styles, marital distress, infidelity, and the psychological impact of childhood emotional neglect.
5. Psychological Construct
The construct operationalized by the Fear of Intimacy Scale is rigorously defined as "the inhibited capacity of an individual, because of anxiety, to exchange thoughts and feelings of personal significance with another individual who is highly valued" (Descutner & Thelen, 1991, p. 219). This definition encompasses three non-negotiable structural parameters: (a) emotional exchange involving personal significance and subjective vulnerability, (b) deep personal value and meaning ascribed to the partner, and (c) an underlying experience of affective anxiety that actively inhibits behavioral disclosure. Rather than indicating an absence of relational yearning, the fear of intimacy represents a painful paradox in which an individual desires closeness yet reflexively mobilizes psychological defenses to avoid perceived injury.
Although the original FIS is frequently scored as a single composite score reflecting overall intimacy anxiety, structural evaluations identify five primary psychological dimensions embedded within its 35 items:
Fear of Emotional Intimacy and Vulnerable Self-Disclosure
This primary dimension reflects intense trepidation surrounding the direct verbal or behavioral disclosure of one’s deepest thoughts, inner wounds, feelings of shame, and authentic emotional states. Individuals high on this dimension view emotional exposure as an existential threat that inevitably invites ridicule, condescension, or disgust. Representative scale behaviors involve hesitance to discuss past shameful incidents, concealing deep emotional injuries, and withholding affection or care when the partner is in distress.
Fear of Physical and Sexual Intimacy
Intimacy encompasses somatic and bodily vulnerability. While the FIS heavily weights psychological disclosure, physical closeness entails somatic transparency, sexual exposure, and emotional surrender. Anxiety in this dimension manifests as marked nervousness around public and private displays of affection, bodily defensiveness, and an inability to experience physical relaxation during tender sexual interactions.
Fear of Relational Commitment and Long-Term Entanglement
This facet assesses the dread associated with locking oneself into long-term relational obligations. Making an explicit commitment to a significant other requires relinquishing alternate options and accepting substantial emotional investment. For fearful individuals, committing implies stepping into a psychological contract where the eventual devastation of abandonment or relational dissolution is perceived as virtually guaranteed.
Fear of Loss of Autonomy and Independence
This sub-construct encapsulates the cognitive fear that entering an intimate union necessitates the complete erosion of individual identity, autonomy, personal boundaries, and agency. Highly fearful respondents dread emotional interdependence, perceiving a partner’s reasonable bids for connection or emotional support as suffocating demands that will subsume their sovereign self.
Fear of Engulfment and Partner Demands
Closely aligned with the fear of lost independence, the fear of engulfment captures the distress experienced when a partner discloses profound emotional burdens or depends upon the individual for psychological sustenance. Individuals experience profound unease when a partner shares intimate troubles, interpreting these interactions as overwhelming emotional claims that exceed their psychological capacity to cope.
6. Theoretical Framework
The Fear of Intimacy Scale is grounded conceptually at the intersection of three major psychotherapeutic and developmental traditions: psychodynamic developmental theory, attachment theory, and interpersonal-existential psychotherapy.
Attachment Theory Foundations
John Bowlby’s foundational formulations regarding primary attachment systems, extended into adulthood by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, provide the primary developmental explanatory framework for the FIS. Securely attached individuals develop positive internal working models of both the self (as worthy of love) and others (as dependable and supportive). Conversely, individuals exhibiting fearful-avoidant (or disorganized) attachment hold negative working models of both self and others.
From an attachment perspective, high scores on the FIS represent systemic operationalizations of avoidant strategies. Having experienced unpredictable, emotionally cold, intrusive, or rejective primary caregivers in childhood, the individual develops secondary attachment strategies dominated by compulsive self-reliance and cognitive deactivation of relational needs. Closeness is encoded neurologically and affectively not as safe or soothing, but as a precursor to pain, abandonment, or suffocating control.
Existential and Psychodynamic Underpinnings
The scale also incorporates key tenets of interpersonal psychodynamics and existential psychology. As articulated by Irvin Yalom and related existential theorists, establishing genuine intimacy forces an encounter with existential vulnerability. To love and allow oneself to be loved requires confronting the inescapable reality that interpersonal connection entails exposure to separation, betrayal, and mortality. Intimacy pierces characterological armor; it exposes flaws that the individual fears will render them unlovable.
Furthermore, psychodynamic conceptualizations of "fear of engulfment versus fear of abandonment" explain the oscillating relational trajectories of high-FIS scorers. When distance is established, these individuals may feel lonely; yet, as emotional intimacy deepens, their defensive apparatus interprets proximity as an existential threat to personal boundaries, prompting sudden emotional withdrawal, hyper-critical assessments of the partner, or abrupt relational termination.
7. Validity
The construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity of the Fear of Intimacy Scale have been empirically substantiated across multiple investigations since its initial 1991 publication.
Convergent and Divergent Validity
In their seminal validation experiments involving independent college cohorts ($N = 180$ and $N = 100$), Descutner and Thelen (1991) subjected the FIS to extensive correlational benchmarking against established psychometric measures:
- Loneliness: The FIS demonstrated substantial positive correlations with the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale ($r = .51, p < .001$), supporting the theoretical assertion that fear-driven avoidance of intimacy ultimately yields social isolation and subjective emotional loneliness.
- Self-Disclosure: As theoretically expected, the FIS correlated strongly and negatively with validated measures of self-disclosure, notably the Miller Social Intimacy Scale (MSIS; $r = -.77, p < .001$) and the Jourard Self-Disclosure Questionnaire ($r = -.58, p < .001$), confirming that high fear scores reflect genuine behavioral and expressive inhibition.
- Social Desirability: To establish that scores were not merely artifacts of impression management, correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale were computed ($r = -.21$). Crucially, when partial correlations were conducted controlling for social desirability, all structural associations between the FIS, loneliness, and self-disclosure remained robust and statistically significant.
Criterion-Related and Behavioral Validity
The FIS exhibits marked predictive and known-groups criterion validity across diverse observational paradigms:
- Relationship History and Duration: Descutner and Thelen revealed that individuals with elevated FIS scores reported a history of significantly shorter romantic relationships and a markedly higher frequency of never having experienced a committed romantic partnership ($p < .01$).
- Clinician and Therapist Ratings: In clinical validation samples, licensed psychotherapists completed blind behavioral ratings of their clients’ interpersonal defensiveness and observed fear of closeness. Clinicians’ external ratings correlated positively and significantly ($r = .42, p < .01$) with clients’ independently completed FIS self-report scores.
- Gender-Role Orientation: In examining sex roles using the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), researchers found that androgynous individuals (exhibiting high expressive and instrumental traits) registered significantly lower fear of intimacy compared to respondents classified as exclusively masculine or undifferentiated.
8. Reliability
The Fear of Intimacy Scale demonstrates consistently superior internal consistency and temporal stability across non-clinical, collegiate, and diverse international populations.
Internal Consistency
During its primary scale development studies, Descutner and Thelen (1991) calculated Cronbach’s alpha coefficients across multiple cohorts, achieving coefficients of $.93$ in their primary derivation sample ($N = 180$) and $.91$ in their secondary replication sample ($N = 100$). Independent cross-validation and replication studies, including research by Doi and Thelen (1993), corroborated these findings with internal consistency estimates consistently exceeding $.90$. When adapted and psychometrically assessed in cross-cultural translations—such as Persian (Fallah-Zade & Farzad, 2012) and Chinese adaptations—Cronbach’s alpha values have routinely registered between $.88$ and $.92$, illustrating outstanding measurement precision across linguistic boundaries.
Test-Retest Stability
Temporal stability was formally verified by administering the instrument to a designated collegiate cohort across a standard one-month (4-week) test-retest interval. The resulting test-retest reliability coefficient was calculated at $r = .89$ ($p < .001$), confirming that the underlying trait tapped by the FIS represents a stable interpersonal disposition rather than a transient, state-dependent affective mood fluctuation.
9. Factor Analysis
Extensive exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses have been performed on the FIS since its inception, examining whether the measure functions best as a unidimensional continuum or as a hierarchically organized multidimensional construct.
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
In the original EFA reported by Descutner and Thelen (1991) utilizing principal axes extraction followed by varimax and oblique rotations, the scree plot and eigenvalue criteria ($lambda > 1.0$) revealed a very large, predominant general factor accounting for the vast majority of the common variance (approximately 33.7% of total variance explained by the initial unrotated factor). Item loadings on this primary general factor were uniformly strong, with 30 of the 35 items exhibiting factor loadings exceeding $.40$, and numerous items related to expressive self-disclosure loading above $.60$.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Multidimensional Models
Subsequent psychometric evaluations (e.g., Doi & Thelen, 1993; Fallah-Zade & Farzad, 2012) evaluated competing structural models. While the unidimensional single-factor model achieves acceptable fit when utilizing aggregated parcel structures, multidimensional CFA specifications routinely uncover three to five correlated latent factors:
- Factor 1: Expression of Personal Feelings / Vulnerability (Items loading heavily: 3, 5, 6, 12, 18, 19, 23, 27)
- Factor 2: Past Relational Avoidance and History (Distinct Part B cluster: Items 31, 32, 33, 34, 35)
- Factor 3: Emotional Support and Boundary Intrusion (Items loading: 13, 20, 26, 28)
- Factor 4: Acceptance of Flaws and Self-Imperfections (Items loading: 1, 2, 10, 14, 21)
In structural equation modeling (SEM), higher-order hierarchical models—wherein a single overarching general Fear of Intimacy second-order factor subsumes these localized first-order factors—demonstrate robust fit indices across samples: Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($ ext{RMSEA}) le .058$, Comparative Fit Index ($ ext{CFI}) ge .92$, and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual ($ ext{SRMR}) le .061$. Consequently, researchers frequently utilize the global composite score, while clinicians benefit from examining discrete subscale elevations.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Instrument Name: Fear of Intimacy Scale (FIS)
- Authors: Carol J. Descutner and Mark H. Thelen (University of Missouri)
- Year of Formal Validation: 1991
- Format: 35-item self-report questionnaire divided into two structural sections: Part A (Items 1–30; situational responses in an imagined or current close relationship) and Part B (Items 31–35; general self-characterizations and past relationship behaviors).
- Target Dyad / Framing: Statements in Part A utilize the standardized designation "O" to represent the respondent’s romantic partner or potential close relationship other.
- Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type scaling:
- 1 = Not at all characteristic of me
- 2 = Slightly characteristic of me
- 3 = Moderately characteristic of me
- 4 = Very characteristic of me
- 5 = Extremely characteristic of me
- Reverse-Scored Items: Exactly 15 items are reverse-keyed (marked in scoring guides with an "X"): Items 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, and 30.
- Scoring recode formula: $1
ightarrow 5$, $2
ightarrow 4$, $3
ightarrow 3$, $4
ightarrow 2$, $5
ightarrow 1$.
- Scoring recode formula: $1
- Scoring and Index Interpretation:
- Score Range: 35 to 175 points.
- Higher aggregate scores indicate greater levels of fear of intimacy, heightened attachment avoidance, and elevated relational defensiveness.
- General Population Reference Norms: Average overall scores typically range from 80 to 90.
- Normative Subgroup Averages: Females typically average between 75 and 85; Males typically average between 85 and 95.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Fear of Intimacy Scale was officially published in 1991 by the American Psychological Association (APA) in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Assessment: A Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The scale was developed under academic research auspices at the University of Missouri.
For non-commercial research, academic, and clinical diagnostic applications, the FIS is widely accessible in the public domain and available within published academic compendiums (such as Corcoran & Fischer’s Measures for Clinical Practice: A Sourcebook). Researchers and clinicians are generally permitted to administer the scale without licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is formally accorded to the authors (Descutner & Thelen, 1991) and the American Psychological Association. For digital dissemination, inclusion in commercial assessment batteries, or proprietary software applications, formal copyright permissions must be requested through the APA Permissions Office or RightsLink.
12. References
- Corcoran, K., & Fischer, J. (2000). Measures for clinical practice: A sourcebook (Vol. 1: Couples, families, and children, 3rd ed.). The Free Press.
- Descutner, C. J., & Thelen, M. H. (1991). Development and validation of a Fear-of-Intimacy Scale. Psychological Assessment: A Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 3(2), 218–225. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.3.2.218
- Doi, S. C., & Thelen, M. H. (1993). The Fear-of-Intimacy Scale: Replication and extension. Psychological Assessment, 5(3), 377–383. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.5.3.377
- Fallah-Zade, H., & Farzad, W. (2012). Psychometric properties of the fear of intimacy scale. Journal of Research in Psychological Health, 5(1), 70–79.
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
- Leary, M. R. (1983). Social anxiety: The construct and its measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(4), 713–725. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.4.713
- Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. Guilford Press.
- Miller, R. S., & Lefcourt, H. M. (1982). The assessment of social intimacy. Journal of Personality Assessment, 46(5), 514–518. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa4605_12