This study explored relations between emotions (including shame, guilt, and the intensity of positive and negative affects), family structure (alliances between family members and boundaries between family members), and family process (disengagement, enmeshment, and cohesiveness). The sample consisted of either students enrolled in a general psychology college course or their siblings, totaling 52 females and 35 males, aged 18-27 years. Measures of emotion included the Personal Feelings Questionnaire and the Affect Intensity Measure; measures of family functioning included the Family Relations Grid, the Family Characteristics Questionnaire, and the Permeability of Boundaries Questionnaire. Results confirmed that family structure and process, and especially the quality of boundary relationships between family members, related to reported individual affective functioning and to sex differences in affective functioning. Perhaps the strongest findings were that: (1) daughters had more intense affective functioning than sons; (2) mother-daughter boundaries were more permeable than mother-son boundaries or than fathers' boundaries with either daughters or sons; (3) instrusiveness was related to the intensity and sometimes the frequency of both daughters' and sons' affect; and (4) a different aspect of fathers' boundary permeability (interest and concern) in both daughters and sons appeared to modulate affect. Reported affective functioning was related not only to the quality of parent-child dyadic relationships, but to systematic relationships within the family, including the quality of mother-father and sibling-subject relationships. (Author/ABL)