The Role of Loneliness and Life Events: Comparing Avoidant and Borderline Personality Features and Their Relation to Depression

ii Personality disorders are theoretically and empirically linked to experiencing high negative affect, such as depression, and individuals with features from some personality disorders, such as borderline (BDL) and avoidant (AVD), are hyper-responsive to rejection. Loneliness has also been established as a vulnerability to the onset of depressive episodes and as an outcome to rejection sensitivity, however the relationship between personality pathology and loneliness is still unclear. The purpose of this study is to compare whether AVD and BDL features might be differentially associated with depression scores by analyzing the interaction with life events and loneliness. We studied a representative, community-based sample (N = 976) of older adults over six months. The main effects of loneliness and the occurrence of a life event independently predicted increased depressive symptoms while controlling for gender, race, baseline depressive scores and personality pathology. The presence of a life event strengthens th