Paul T. P. Wong is a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor. His research career has gone through four stages, with significant contributions in each stage: learning theory, social cognition, existential psychology, and positive psychology. He is most known for his integrative work on death acceptance, meaning therapy, and second wave positive psychology (PP 2.0). He has been elected as a fellow for both the American Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association.
Wong is the Founder and President of the International Network on Personal Meaning and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy. With more than 300 publications in journals and book chapters, his major books are the two editions of The Human Quest for Meaning: A Handbook of Psychological Research and Clinical Applications (1998) and The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications (2012), as well as The Handbook of Multicultural Perspectives on Stress and Coping (2006).
Wong is currently adjunct professor at Saybrook University and Professor Emeritus of Trent University and Trinity Western University. At the latter, he was the Founding Director of the Graduate Counselling Psychology Program. He also taught at the University of Texas at Austin, York University, and the Graduate Division of the University of Toronto.
Personal life
Wong was born in Tianjin, China in 1937 and migrated to Hong Kong in 1948. He came to Canada as an international student in 1961, earning his B.Th. from the Toronto Bible College (now Tyndale University College and Seminary) in 1964 and B.A. in Honours Psychology from Carleton University in 1967. In 1970, he earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Toronto.
Wong's career straddles two domains: psychology and Christian ministry. He first served as the Founding Pastor of the Chinese Gospel Church in Toronto in the early 1960s, and then started the Peterborough Chinese Christian Fellowship in the 1970s while teaching at Trent University. He was involved in resettling the boat people in the 1980s. Afterward, he founded the graduate program in counselling psychology at Trinity Western University in the early 1990s. During his tenure, he started a neighbours-together program and received a Cultural Harmony Award from VanCity for his community outreach.
Research
Wong's research career has covered several domains in psychology: learning theory, social cognition, existential psychology, and positive psychology.
Learning theory
Wong's first decade of research in the area of animal learning focused on how to develop persistence in animals in spite of frustration or pain. Through a variety of intermittent reinforcement and punishment schedules, he taught animals persistence in overcoming prolonged failure. This series of research provided an animal model of the positive psychology of optimism and grit as well as the empirical basis for his deep-and-wide hypothesis of negative situations. His research on persistence has also led to Rosenbaum's development of learned resourcefulness.
Social cognition
In the area of social cognition, Wong's main contribution was the demonstration of spontaneous attribution, both causal and existential. As well, Wong demonstrated that internal and external control are two separate dimensions rather than opposite poles on the same continuum. This finding later led to the development of the dual-system model of adaptation and the dialectical approach to positive psychology.
Wong's main contribution to stress and coping research is the resource-congruence model and the Stress Appraisal Measure (SAM). Wong also made the case that effective coping needs to be a part of positive psychology in his second wave of positive psychology (PP 2.0).
In the area of positive aging and dying, Wong redirected the concept of successful aging from an emphasis on physical and biological factors to a psychological and spiritual orientation. Wong also developed the Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R), which includes three kinds of death acceptance as positive ways to cope with the reality of death.