From left: Shalene Allen, Leslie Hammer, and Cynthia Mohr accepting the Best Paper Award at the "Work, Stress and Health 2025" Conference on July 10, 2025
Cynthia Mohr, professor of psychology at Portland State University (PSU), is making important strides in occupational health science. This year alone, she received the 2025 Best Paper Award from Occupational Health Science, was elected to a national leadership role with the American Psychological Association (APA), and secured new grant funding from the Department of Defense for research aimed at improving mental health outcomes.
Mohr’s work centers on the role of social connections—especially how they influence well-being in workplaces and in military communities.
"There's a lot of data to show that we're lonely. The World Health Organization has identified loneliness as a societal problem with important outcomes related to well-being, and we're going to have to address it at every level. We have to think about how to improve people's social connections within school systems, workplaces, and at the community level," Mohr said.
Earlier this summer, Mohr and colleagues Leslie Hammer (OHSU), Jennifer Dimoff (U Ottawa), and Shalene Allen (PSU) accepted the Best Paper Award at the "Work, Stress and Health 2025" Conference in Seattle. Their award-winning paper, "A Framework for Protecting and Promoting Employee Mental Health through Supervisor Supportive Behaviors," offers an evidence-based framework for supervisors to address and mitigate employee mental health challenges. This paper is a culmination of years of collaborative research between the four co-authors.
The framework identifies six Mental Health Supportive Supervisor Behaviors:
- Emotional support,
- Practical support,
- Role modeling,
- Reducing stigma,
- Warning sign recognition, and
- Warning sign response.
The proactive strategies—emotional support, practical support, and role modeling—are preventive approaches, while the responsive strategies—stigma reduction, warning sign recognition, and warning sign response—address existing mental health concerns.
These strategies are designed to be easily trained and implemented by managers. As Mohr explained in an interview for the "Healthy Work" podcast, role modeling is particularly crucial. It involves supervisors openly sharing how they manage their own mental health challenges, thereby destigmatizing these experiences and fostering an environment where employees feel comfortable discussing their issues.
Emotional support, she added, is about developing genuine connections and demonstrating care for employees as individuals, recognizing that managers must truly know their team members to offer effective support.
Further demonstrating her leadership in the field, Mohr has been elected the new Division 8 Representative to the American Psychological Association (APA) Council of Representatives. This governance role will allow her to advocate for the importance of social psychology in addressing societal challenges.
Mohr's dedication to mental health extends beyond the workplace to pressing societal issues, as evidenced by her recent grant awards, one to OHSU with Mohr as the co-Investigator, and a second new award directly to PSU with Mohr as the Principle Investigator. The new project, titled “Addressing Problematic Anger Upstream: Bolstering Primary Prevention Efforts to Mitigate Alcohol Misuse and Suicidality,” received official funding and commenced on July 15. This critical research is funded by a new Department of Defence program created to partner with academics to develop new intervention strategies to reduce facing alarmingly high rates of suicide and alcohol abuse, with incidents often occurring when service members are at home. Mohr’s work focuses on the National Guard and studies two key risk factors tied to her previous research: the impact of of problematic anger and loneliness on rates of suicide, alcohol misuse and poor psychological health in National Guard members. .
The project, conducted in collaboration with long-term partners in the Oregon National Guard, draws on Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) practices. It will involve a community advisory board (CAB) including experts and individuals with lived experience to guide research questions, methods, and data analysis.
This research aims to identify risk factors early through brief questionnaires for problematic anger and loneliness, enabling efficient and effective prevention programs.
Mohr's overall research broadly focuses on the critical role of social relationships in fostering a healthy and thriving society. Her prior Department of Defense-funded work on a Workplace Mental Health Training (WMHT) for military leaders had significant positive effects, including reducing service member loneliness and problematic or excessive anger. This success forms the "jumping off point" for her current funded research projects.
In a time marked by extreme levels of burnout, anxiety, depression, and trauma due to extraorganizational stressors like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and social unrest, the attention to workplace mental health is more timely than ever. Dr. Mohr and her colleagues argue that the workplace is a "missing link" in public health mental health protection. By providing evidence-based frameworks and interventions, they aim to equip supervisors and managers with the tools to increase social support and connectedness, thereby reducing employee loneliness and stigma, and ultimately contributing to the prevention of chronic mental disorders in the population.
Through her ongoing research, national leadership, and dedication to addressing critical public health concerns, Dr. Cynthia Mohr continues to make invaluable contributions to fostering healthier, more connected communities and workplaces.