Journal of Language and Social Psychology

This is the very first time that the Journal of Language and Social Psychology has ever celebrated an anniversary with a Special Commemorative Issue. In this article, an institutional history of the journal is crafted, together with a brief overview of the articles that follow.

The Journal of Language and Social Psychology has been publishing articles for 30 years. In this article, three different kinds of analyses (viz., content codings, word clouds, and a textual procedure) examining trends over and between the three decades are reported. Drawing on these, future directions for the journal and the field in general are anticipated and proposed.

In the ever-increasing globalization of the world, there has been a parallel increase in the amount of contact between members of different social groups, and thus, more opportunities than ever before for discrimination based on prejudice. This article is premised on the belief that language plays a central role in prejudice. Taking as a base the 2007 Journal of Language and Social Psychology special issue on language and discrimination, this review examines empirical evidence linking language and prejudice. It offers a taxonomic classification using a modified version of an earlier model crossed with three causal hypotheses. From this review, it can be concluded that prejudice can have both an implicit and explicit effect on language and that language plays a critical role in every form of prejudice. This strongly suggests that not only are language and prejudice inextricably linked but also that the study of prejudice without a consideration of language is incomplete.

In 2004, the second International Association of Language and Social Psychology Task Force focused on relationships involving language and emerging communication technology, culminating in a Special Issue of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology (Vol. 23, No. 4). The present article reviews the topics and conclusions of that work and traces the continuation of study on those topics as they have evolved and influenced language and social psychology research to the present. Communication technology research offers views on the central question of how individuals adapt language to communicative action in the presence or absence of various nonverbal cue systems. This question is reflected in topics such as the expression of affect and immediacy online, the virtual presentation of self and gender, the management of online conversations, adaptation via visual grounding in electronic collaboration, and the employment of online interaction technology to reduce intergroup prejudice. As communication systems have evolved, interfaces offer new cues and representations of users, which continue to propel inquiry into these central questions about language and its usage within various technological contexts.

In this article, five papers that formed the Special Issue for the fourth International Association of Language and Social Psychology Taskforce on health communication are revisited. Our starting point is Gallois’s epilogue and the six themes she identified from those papers. These themes are invoked to explore where health communication is moving in the 21st century. Burgeoning work on intergroup communication in this context, patient voice, minority groups, and the role of the carer are highlighted.

This epilogue to the 30-year Commemorative Issue of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology draws on four articles represented in this Issue to demonstrate the role this journal, in conjunction with the International Association of Language and Social Psychology, has had in identifying, examining, and shaping a research agenda of socially significant issues. Exigencies of the 21st century are examined to offer predictions for the future of the subdiscipline of the social psychology of language and make recommendations of topics for study.