Prologue: History, Themes, Analysis, and Rationale

Abstract

In this Special Issue, we commemorate 40 years of publishing research in the Journal of Language & Social Psychology (JLSP). We first provide a brief glimpse of the history of the field of language and social psychology and the emergence of JLSP within it. This is then developed further by exploring the themes—and the relationships between them—arising over the four decades of the journal, by means of a Leximancer analysis of the titles and abstracts of all research articles since the journal’s inception. We describe our data-driven rationale for the topics selected for the Anniversary Issue and provide an overview of the articles that follow this Prologue; we highlight their unique features and contributions to the advancement of the field of language and social psychology.