The experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment exposes individuals to myriad physical and emotional stressors. Emotional perturbations and chronic negative affective states associated with stressors can confer increased risk for depression, sleep disturbance, and declining physical health, as well as invoke potent negative effects on cellular immune processes. Use of coping strategies that lead one to focus on and regulate difficult emotions (emotional approach coping) related to one’s cancer experience has potential for modifying the affective response and improving psychological and physical health outcomes in men with cancer. Emotional approach coping (EAC) is comprised of two distinct but related emotion-regulating strategies: emotional processing and emotional expression. A series of studies conducted with men with mixed cancer types, including a study of men with prostate cancer and a multi-phase study of young adults with testicular cancer, will be presented. Findings will identify contextual factors that condition the use and utility of EAC to psychological adjustment. Results point to gender role norms and cancer-related masculine threat as limiting men from benefiting from emotion-regulating coping efforts, particularly in less open interpersonal environments and in younger men. In addition to evidence suggesting a benefit of EAC on cancer-related psychological outcomes, findings will also point to associations with physical functioning and biological processes. In a study of prostate cancer patients (N=66), decreased emotional processing predicted declining prostate-related functioning, including sexual functioning and urinary and bowel incontinence.  Likewise, emotional processing predicted a decline in two inflammatory markers: IL-6 (B=-.63, p<.05) and CRP (B=-.47, p<.05). Finally, associations of EAC to cancer-related sleep disturbance will be discussed. EAC is associated with lower sleep quality across studies. Taken together, these findings focus on an understudied patient population and point to emotional processing and emotional expression as key emotion-regulation processes with significant potential as targets of clinical intervention.