Bridge over the ocean: Histories of social psychology in Europe and North America. An analysis of chronological corpora

Since the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP - initially called European Association of Experimental Social Psychology) has been established in 1966, what was then considered “European” social psychology has been working to affirm its own identity by presenting a distinctive brand to the rest of the world in general and to North America in particular. This study aims to compare European and U.S. social psychology through the analysis of the papers published by two of the main journals in their field: The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the European Journal of Social Psychology. All the abstracts (from the first publication to the last one in 2016) of the two journals papers have been collected. By means of a (lexical) correspondence analysis (SPAD software), 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 (IRaMuTeQ and R software). Results show that even if there are some typical features that distinguish the “European” from the “American” social psychology some publication trends seem to converge. Results will be discussed also reflecting on the contribution of these methods in studying the history/ies of a discipline.