Editorial: Positive psychological assessments: Modern approaches, methodologies, models and guidelines: Current perspectives

Sparked by evidence showing that positive psychological approaches and practices not only foster flourishing but also help to reduce mental illness, maintain mental health, and strengthen one's psychological resources and capacities (Waters et al., 2022), positive psychology interventions and coaching have emerged as popular approaches for practitioners interested in the development and wellbeing of people (Lomas, 2020; Moskowitz et al., 2021; Richter et al., 2021). Indeed, bourgeoning evidence for the social, behavioral, and physical health benefits of positive psychology constructs (Donaldson et al., 2021; Moskowitz et al., 2021) has led to an increasing influence of positive psychology underpinning practice (Green and Palmer, 2019), with significant growth of the use of positive psychological assessment measures (PPAMs). Despite such popularity, research has also highlighted the shortcomings of existing PPAMs (e.g., Wong and Roy, 2017; van Zyl and Rothmann, 2022), with important implications for a valid and reliable assessment of the effectiveness of positive psychology practices as well as the advancement of our understanding of wellbeing through the development and conceptualization of new positive psychological constructs (Gruman et al., 2018; van Zyl and Rothmann, 2022; Van Zyl and Salanova, 2022). For example, it has been argued that the broad category of wellbeing, encompassing independent and separable components (Diener, 1984; Ng et al., 2021), is inconsistently operationalized across studies, making it difficult to determine whether positive psychology interventions have stronger effects on particular aspects of wellbeing compared to others (Moskowitz et al., 2021). Similarly, across different studies, diverse positive constructs can be found grouped together, for example, combining positive emotions with outcomes (e.g., meaning, purpose, life satisfaction; Sin and Lyubomirsky, 2009; Chakhssi et al., 2018) or with other cognitive and affective appraisals of one's life as a whole (Bolier et al., 2013; Hendriks et al., 2019; Moskowitz et al., 2021). Given the key role of PPAMs in advancing the science and practice of positive psychology (van Zyl and Rothmann, 2022), this Research Topic specifically focused on collecting evidence and informed proposals of modern approaches, methodologies, models, and guidelines for PPAMs.