Joel Wong has won the 2026 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Counseling Psychology's Prevention Section. Wong was selected for "exceptional, sustained contributions to the advancement of prevention and health promotion in counseling psychology."
“I was incredibly honored to be nominated. I’m also very grateful to Dr. John Romano for initiating this nomination,” Wong said.
A recent focus of Wong’s research has been positive psychology interventions, such as gratitude and encouragement, as psychological buffers that build strengths before distress sets in. His 2015 article on the , published in The Counseling Psychologist, transformed encouragement from a vague concept to a well-defined construct that has inspired several new trajectories of research by other scholars. More recently, Wong was a guest co-editor for the 2025 special issue on published in the Journal of Prevention and Health Promotion.