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.

Language and Social Psychology Approaches to Race, Racism, and Social Justice: Analyzing the Past and Revealing Ways Forward

“…In a recent review of four decades of JLSP history, Giles, Hansen et al (2021a) presented a Leximancer concept map of JLS P research articles (see Figure 1, p. 7). While the articles do address intergroup, gender, age, and discrimination, there is nothing prominently apparent on race.…”

“…10–11). Moving to journal Special Issues, while there have been four Special Issues (out of 34) relating to discrimination and intergroup communication and analyses of various “-isms” (e.g., sexism, racism) in interaction (Clément, 1996, 2007; Formanowicz & Suitner, 2020; Whitehead & Stokoe, 2015), there has not been one devoted to race and/or racism (see Giles, 2012a, Table 1, p. 357; and Giles, Hansen et al, 2021a, Table 1, p. 5).…”

“…As a means of profiling the main topics and themes that have appeared in the 83 articles located above, we conducted a lexicometric analysis to explore any potential changes that have taken place since 1982. Leximancer has been used to support research in many areas, including politics, psychology, health, business, and other domains (see Leximancer web site: https://info.leximancer.com/; also Angus and Gallois, 2017; Cretchley et al, 2010) as well as the social psychology of language (Giles, Hansen et al, 2021a). Leximancer text analytics software was used to conduct an automatic analysis of the conceptual content of the titles and abstracts.…”

Public Expressions of Empathy and Sympathy by U.S. Criminal Justice Officials After Controversial Police Killings of African-Americans

“…Over the past 40 years, the research published in JLSP has evolved toward “a more nuanced study of language and its components in the context of intergroup communication and prejudice” (see also Cervone et al, 2021; Giles et al, 2021, p. 9). One domain in which intergroup communication and prejudice are highly salient is the relationship between law enforcement and the public.…”

Introduction: Language and Communication Related to COVID-19

“…Though questions like these are urgently needed and found consideration in books (Jetten et al, 2020), scientific journals, and respective special issues on COVID-19 and its impacts on individual and social challenges and communication (e.g., Cantarero, et al, 2020; Meier et al, 2021; Nan & Thompson, 2021; Nguyen & Catalan-Matamoros, 2020; Priest & Myrick, 2020; Quandt, 2021), our special issue on language and communication in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology ( JLSP ) addresses these questions in light of the unique focus of the journal. Serving as guest editors for this special issue we are luckily able to refer to this year's first volume of JLSP addressing 40 years of publishing research in this outlet (Giles et al, 2021). Directly following the most present themes between the years 2012 and 2020, this special issue explores the intersections between language and social (Lux et al, 2021; Malik et al, 2021), language and words (Janssen et al, 2021; Shulman et al, 2021; Tian et al, 2021; Tu et al, 2021), and language and discrimination (Vacchini et al, 2021).…”