Briana Joseph

Youth mental health challenges are increasing, negatively influencing adolescents’ physical, social, and emotional well-being. Early intervention is important, but a shortage of providers limits access to services. Youth mentoring programs can address this gap while reducing the stigma associated with seeking professional help. Mentor approaches to youth emotions significantly impact mental health outcomes. An emotion-dismissing approach is associated with poor outcomes, whereas emotion coaching is related to positive ones. Given gender differences in emotional socialization, this study examines whether mentors’ approaches differ by mentor and youth mentee gender. Baseline data from a longitudinal mentor training project was used. Mentors (n=27) completed the Professional Emotion Coaching Questionnaire to report on their emotion-dismissing and emotion-coaching tendencies. Independent sample t-test compared tendencies by gender. Results showed that cisgender men had higher dismissing scores (M = 2.22, SD = 0.22) than the cisgender women, transgender, and nonbinary individuals combined (M= 1.66, SD = 0.31), t(25) = -3.68, p = 0.001. Mentors paired with a cisgender male youth mentees also had higher dismissing scores (M = 2.09, SD = 0.50) than mentors paired with others (M= 1.65 , SD = 0.24), t(25) = -3.09, p = 0.005. Emotion coaching tendencies did not differ by gender (p >.05). These findings indicate that male mentors and mentors of boys are more likely to exhibit an emotion-dismissing approach, increasing youth mental health risks. Enhanced mentor training and supervision may be needed to reduce emotion-dismissing tendencies and improve mentoring outcomes.