Histories of Social Psychology in Europe and North America, as Seen from Research Topics in Two Key Journals

The study presented in this chapter compares European and US social psychology through the analysis of papers published by two pivotal journals in the discipline: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the European Journal of Social Psychology. Scientific production can be considered a starting point for the study of the history of a discipline as it includes theories, application domains and methods that contribute to delineate its trajectory. All the abstracts (from the first publication to the last one in 2016) of the papers of the two journals were collected. By means of a correspondence analysis, the existence of a latent temporal pattern in keywords’ occurrences was explored. Furthermore, in order to detect, retrieve and compare the main topics the journals dealt with over time, an analysis implemented by means of Reinert’s method was conducted. The topics evolution along time was thus observed and matched in the two journals. Results showed that the two journals have common trajectories particularly in their inception (among others, studies on aggression and attribution) and more recently (among others, studies on gender by means of implicit measures and culture). However, the distinctive feature that characterises the US social psychology, that is the attention on the individual aspects, and the one that characterises the European one, that is the attention on social aspects, seems to remain.