EJSP abstracts 1971-2016

The European Journal of Social Psychology (EJSP), as the voice of the European Association of Social Psychology, aims to promote diversity and a distinctively “European”, more “social”, social psychology (SP). However, whether and how these objectives have been accomplished over time remains controversial. This paper enters this debate, tracing the history of SP as depicted by EJSP publications, via two types of lexicometric analyses of all abstracts of the Journal (1971‐2016). Themes, processes, methods, and their organization in cycles and clusters over time, were identified and analysed. Regarding diversity, findings indicate that the publications reflect several of the new theoretical proposals that emerged over the years, but do not fully reflect the variety of perspectives and methods of the discipline. It further indicates that lately the “social” is predominantly present in attention to pressing social issues, albeit the processes involved in them are mostly theorized at an individualistic level. This pattern suggests the importance of keeping open the quest for epistemological and methodological diversity, and of re‐problematizing what the “social” in SP means. By contributing to mapping the history of SP, offering a more comprehensive and reflexive view for it, the present analyses also help in forging a stronger discipline.