Prologue: History, Themes, Analysis, and Rationale

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.