About

Hyesung Grace Hwang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology within the Social Sciences Division. Her research focuses on how racial and linguistic diversity in neighborhood, community, and cultural contexts influence social group conception in both racial majority and minority children. She investigates how a person’s accent functions as an important social marker alongside race, and explores how children learn about societal inequalities and how to foster political activism. Hwang holds a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, an M.S.W. from Columbia University, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago. Her work includes examining neural responses to racial demographics in infants, children’s categorization based on phonological proficiency, and the development of reasoning about nationality in children. She is actively engaged in understanding the social and developmental implications of diversity and inequality.

Research topics

• Developmental psychology
• Social psychology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Becoming Partisan: The Development of Children's Social Preferences Based on Political Markers

  2025-10-04

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What political party or what presidential candidate a person supports is often used by adults to divide their social world. However, little is known about whether young children also engage in such tendencies, or whether political groups are even socially meaningful for young children. To trace the beginnings of these tendencies, the current study investigated whether 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children use political markers, such as political party affiliation and support for presidential candidates, to guide their social preferences. We also examined children’s ability to report their political affiliation, whether their political affiliation matched their parents’, how accurate they are at reporting their parents’ political affiliations, and whether having parent-child conversations about politics predicted children’s political affiliation and social preferences. We found that children as young as 6 years of age showed ingroup preferences for individuals who shared their own or their parents' political affiliations – especially based on support for presidential candidates. Notably, even if children could not report their own presidential candidate choice or were inaccurate at predicting their parents' presidential candidate choice, children still preferred people who supported the same presidential candidate as their parents. Further, children who had conversations with their parents about politics were more likely to prefer people who matched their parents’ political affiliations. This study provides the first empirical evidence that 6- to 12-year-old children are using political markers to form ingroup preferences and show rudimentary forms of political partisanship.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infant neural responses to strangers of different races

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2025-05-12

  other

  This study aims to investigate differences in infants’ neural responses to strangers who are of the same (i.e., ingroup) versus different (i.e., outgroup) racial backgrounds. We will examine infants’ neural processing of stranger's reach-to-grasp action. We will also examine infants’ neural responses to strangers from different racial backgrounds as the strangers approach the infant and play peekaboo. We will focus on mu desynchronization as a neural correlate of neural mirroring (Fox et al., 2016), frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) as an indicator of infants’ approach/withdrawal response (Fox et al., 2001), and frontal theta oscillations (Begus et al., 2016; Hwang et al., 2022) as reflecting top-down attention while infants observe actions and social interactions with people from different racial backgrounds. Because exposure to racial diversity influences social group preferences and neural responses to racial ingroup vs. outgroup strangers (Hwang et al., 2022), we will also examine how neighborhood and interpersonal racial diversity might influence infants’ neural responses to outgroup strangers. Further, given that temperament and FAA are correlated (Fox et al., 2001), we will also examine the relation between FAA and temperament and control for infant temperament when examining the effects of FAA.

  Publisher

• Language exposure predicts infants’ neural processing of others’ actions based on language group

  Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience · 2025-11-20

  articleOpen access

  What language a person speaks has been shown to divide even infants' worlds. However, open questions remain about what neural processes are involved in the differentiation of native and foreign speakers in the infant's brain. This study used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the neural responses related to top-down attention (frontal theta synchronization), action processing (mu desynchronization), and approach-avoidance (frontal alpha asymmetry) of 8- to 12-month-old infants as they observed a native (English) speaker and a foreign (French) speaker perform a goal-directed action (i.e., grasping objects). We further examined whether infants' language exposure modulated these neural responses. We found that monolingual infants exhibited stronger mu desynchronization when observing a native (versus foreign) speaker perform goal-directed actions. In contrast, non-monolingual (i.e., hearing more than one language) infants did not show a difference in mu desynchronization between native and foreign speakers. No language group and exposure effects were found for frontal theta and frontal alpha symmetry. These results suggest that infants' emerging differentiation of native and foreign speakers is also manifested in their neural processing of goal-directed actions and that this neural action processing is shaped by early exposure to different languages.

  PublisherDOI

• Becoming partisan: The development of children’s social preferences based on political markers.

  Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2025-09-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What political party or what presidential candidate a person supports is often used by adults to divide their social world. However, little is known about whether young children also engage in such tendencies or whether political groups are even socially meaningful for young children. To trace the beginnings of these tendencies, the present study investigated whether 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children use political markers, such as political party affiliation and support for presidential candidates, to guide their social preferences. We also examined children's ability to report their political affiliation, whether their political affiliation matched their parents', how accurate they are at reporting their parents' political affiliations, and whether having parent-child conversations about politics predicted children's political affiliation and social preferences. We found that children as young as 6 years of age showed ingroup preferences for individuals who shared their own or their parents' political affiliations-especially based on support for presidential candidates. Notably, even if children could not report their own presidential candidate choice or were inaccurate at predicting their parents' presidential candidate choice, children still preferred people who supported the same presidential candidate as their parents. Further, children who had conversations with their parents about politics were more likely to prefer people who matched their parents' political affiliations. This study provides the first empirical evidence that 6- to 12-year-old children are using political markers to form ingroup preferences and show rudimentary forms of political partisanship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Children's social wariness toward a different‐race stranger relates to individual differences in temperament

  Developmental Science · 2023-03-24

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When children first meet a stranger, there is great variation in how much they will approach and engage with the stranger. While individual differences in this type of behavior-called social wariness-are well-documented in temperament research, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the social groups (such as race) of the stranger and how these characteristics might influence children's social wariness. In contrast, research on children's social bias and interracial friendships rarely examines individual differences in temperament and how temperament might influence cross-group interactions. The current study bridges the gap across these different fields of research by examining whether the racial group of an unfamiliar peer or adult moderates the association between temperament and the social wariness that children display. Utilizing a longitudinal dataset that collected multiple measurements of children's temperament and behaviors (including parent-reported shyness and social wariness toward unfamiliar adults and peers) across early childhood, we found that 2- to 7-year-old children with high parent-reported shyness showed greater social wariness toward a different-race stranger compared to a same-race stranger, whereas children with low parent-reported shyness did not. These results point to the importance of considering racial group membership in temperament research and the potential role that temperament might play in children's cross-race interactions. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Previous research on temperament has not considered how the race of strangers could influence children's social wariness. We find evidence that 2- to 7-year-old children with high parent-reported shyness show greater social wariness toward a different-race stranger compared to a same-race stranger. These results point to the importance of considering racial group membership in temperament research. Our findings also suggest temperament may play a role in children's cross-race interactions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Optimal gestational age at cervical length measurement for predicting preterm birth in low-risk women

  American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology · 2023-01-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Black and White children’s race-based information endorsement and teacher preference: Effects of school and neighborhood racial demographics.

  Developmental Psychology · 2023-01-12 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The current study examined whether racially minoritized children and racial majority children demonstrate different race-based learning preferences and whether the racial demographics of their schools and neighborhoods predict these preferences. Race-based information endorsement and teacher preferences of Black and White 3- to 7-year-old children (n = 238) recruited from a metropolitan area in the midwestern United States were examined. Across racially homogeneous and diverse schools, both Black and White children showed a White preference in information endorsement and teacher preference. Black and White children did not differ in their information endorsement, but they did differ in their teacher preferences: Black children chose Black teachers more than White children. Further, children overall chose the accurate adult as their teacher regardless of the adults race, but the racial demographics of childrens schools and neighborhoods related to these responses: Three-year-old children were more likely to select the accurate Black adult over the inaccurate White adult if there were more Black teachers in their schools and larger Black populations in their neighborhoods. Exploratory analyses indicated that 5- to 7-year-old White children who had non-White classroom teachers chose Black adults more than those who had White classroom teachers, but classroom teachers race did not relate to Black childrens teacher preference. The findings suggest that both microlevel factors (e.g., childrens classroom teachers) and macrolevel factors (e.g., proportion of Black teachers in childrens schools and Black population in their neighborhoods) could influence who children choose to learn from and prefer as teachers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Development of infants’ preferential looking toward native language speakers across distinct social contexts.

  Developmental Psychology · 2023-11-16 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Presenting pictures of faces side by side is a common paradigm to assess infants' attentional biases according to social categories, such as gender, race, and language. However, seeing static faces does not represent infants' typical experience of the social world, which involves people in motion and performing actions. Here, we assessed infants' looking preferences for native over foreign language speakers in two social contexts: the presentation of static faces and the presentation of people performing instrumental actions. In addition, we tested infants' preferential looking at 5 and 9 months of age to assess whether their pattern of preferential looking changes across development. The results of 5-month-old infants replicated and extended previous findings by showing that, at this age, infants typically look longer at people who previously spoke their native language. As found for other social categories such as race and gender, this familiarity-based looking preference was not evident at 9 months of age when infants were presented with static faces. However, when presented with more informative dynamic events, 9-month-old infants showed a temporally aligned preference for the native over the foreign language speaker. Specifically, infants' looking preference was time-locked to the completion of the action goal: when speakers grasped and lifted a toy. These results suggest potentially a familiarity-based preference toward native language speakers around 5 months of age, which may later develop into a more strategic selective response in service of information-seeking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• GOING META:

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2021-12-07

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Native Speakers Are More Likeable and Knowledgeable, But Foreign Speakers Aren't Bad: Disentangling Language-Based Social Preferences in Early Childhood

  Open MIND · 2021-01-01

  other
  Publisher

Recent grants

• The malleability of social group understanding in infancy

  NIH · $200k · 2021–2023

• The malleability of social group understanding in infancy and early childhood

  NIH · $746k · 2021–2026

• Development of group preference in infancy

  NIH · $167k · 2018–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Lori Markson

  Washington University in St. Louis

  10 shared

• Jared V. Balbona

  Washington University in St. Louis

  6 shared

• Ranjan Debnath

  University Hospital Magdeburg

  4 shared

• Marlene Meyer

  Technical University of Munich

  4 shared

• Virginia C. Salo

  Vanderbilt University

  4 shared

• Amanda L. Woodward

  University of Chicago

  4 shared

• Nathan A. Fox

  4 shared

• Jocelyn Dautel

  Queen's University Belfast

  3 shared