Hyesung Grace Hwang

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of California, Santa Cruz

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 t...

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...

Early in life, greater exposure to diverse people can change the tendency to prefer one’s own social group. For instance, infants from racially diverse environments show less preference for their own-race (ingroup) over other-race (outgroup) faces than infants from racially homogeneous environments. Yet how social environment changes ingroup versus...

Early in life, greater exposure to diverse people can change the tendency to prefer one’s own social group. For instance, infants from racially diverse environments show less preference for their own‐race (ingroup) over other‐race (outgroup) faces than infants from racially homogeneous environments. Yet how social environment changes ingroup versus...

Starting in the preschool years, children show socially exclusive behaviors, such as intentionally leaving out another child from a ball game. Prior research investigating social exclusion understanding in preschoolers primarily used interview methods and it is clear that the verbal and cognitive skills necessary to identify and reason about social...

When people are rejected by others, they typically feel an immediate sense of pain—referred to as social pain. Social pain is hypothesized to be the alarm response of a “quick and crude” ostracism detection system, a system that is highly sensitive to even minimal signs of exclusion. Physiological reactivity has been found to accompany this social...

When people are rejected by others, they typically feel an immediate sense of pain –referred to as social pain. Social pain is hypothesized to be the alarm response of a “quick and crude” ostracisim detection system, a system that is highly sensitive to even minimal signs of exclusion. Physiological reactivity has been found to accompany this socia...

The classic Aesop’s fable, Crow and the Pitcher, has inspired a major line of research in comparative cognition. Over the past several years, five articles (over 32 experiments) have examined the ability of corvids (e.g., rooks, crows, and jays) to complete lab-based analogs of this fable, by requiring them to drop stones and other objects into tub...

Children categorize native-accented speakers as local and non-native-accented speakers as foreign, suggesting they use accent (i.e., phonological proficiency) to determine social group membership. However, it is unclear if accent is the strongest – and only – group marker children use to determine social group membership, or whether other aspects o...

Humans are motivated to connect with others and are sensitive to social exclusion – the intentional leaving out of others. This ability to detect social exclusion is suggested to be evolutionarily adaptive, biologically hardwired, and an important feature of social cognitive development. Yet it is unclear when children start to independently detect...

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The current experiments...

Adults implicitly judge people from certain social backgrounds as more "American" than others. This study tests the development of children's reasoning about nationality and social categories. Children across cultures (White and Korean American children in the United States, Korean children in South Korea) judged the nationality of individuals vary...

Compared with the extant research on heterosexual intimate partner violence (IPV)—including the knowledge base on alcohol and illicit drug use as predictors of such IPV—there is a paucity of studies on IPV among men who have sex with men (MSM), especially Black MSM. This study investigates the prevalence of experiencing and perpetrating IPV among a...

Introduction: This article provides an overview of the financial lives of women (n = 204) engaging in sex work in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Methods: This paper presents findings from a computer-based, interviewer-administered baseline assessment administered with women recruited for participation in a randomized controlled trial testing the feasibilit...