Although researchers have focused considerable attention on intimacy, professionals know relatively little about how personality disorder symptomatology affects relational affect and attachment. To better understand these issues, we designed the present research to determine whether personality disorder symptomatology would be associated with university students' reports of (a) their relationship affect (i.e., relational-satisfaction, relational-depression, relational-anxiety, and relational-esteem) and (b) their relationship attachment tendencies (i.e., secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing types of romantic attachment). The results indicated that personality disorder symptomatology was positively associated with dysphoric relationship affect and insecure types of attachment, but negatively associated with nondysphoric relationship affect and the secure type of attachment. The discussion focuses on future research related to these findings.

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