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.

中文翻译：

---

序言：历史、主题、分析和基本原理

在本期特刊中，我们纪念在语言与社会心理学杂志 (JLSP) 上发表研究 40 年。我们首先简要介绍语言和社会心理学领域的历史以及 JLSP 在其中的出现。然后，通过对自该杂志成立以来所有研究文章的标题和摘要进行 Leximance 分析，探索该杂志四个十年中出现的主题以及它们之间的关系，进一步发展了这一点。我们描述了我们为周年纪念问题选择的主题的数据驱动的基本原理，并概述了本序言之后的文章；我们强调他们的独特之处和对语言和社会心理学领域进步的贡献。