Bullying at school is a serious social problem that influences the wellbeing of everyone involved, that is, victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Among the many health and psychological problems that these individuals may develop, emotion dysregulation appears to be a common marker. To date, however, it remains unclear whether bullying experienced during the school years is associated with emotion dysregulation also in adulthood. In this study, by adopting a retrospective approach, we investigated whether involvement in bullying at school—either as a bully, victim, or bystander—could put these individuals at risk of presenting deficits in emotion regulation in adulthood, as assessed with behavioral (explicit) and physiological (implicit) indexes (i.e., skin conductance), and whether the association between the involvement in bullying and emotion regulation was direct or mediated by other factors, such as somatic complaints and sensation seeking. A total of 58 young adults were asked to control their emotional reactions in front of images with strong emotional content, and to explicitly evaluate them with ratings, while their arousal was measured through skin conductance. They also responded to questionnaires about retrospective involvement in bullying, somatic complaints, and sensation seeking. Results revealed that victimization and bystander behavior were directly and negatively associated with emotion regulation as assessed with skin conductance, whereas bullying was positively associated with implicit emotion regulation through the mediation of sensation seeking. Interestingly, emotion regulation as assessed with explicit ratings was not associated with any of the characteristics of the participants. Our study suggests that being directly (as victim) but also indirectly (as bystander) involved in bullying at school time is associated with difficulties in emotional wellbeing in adulthood. Furthermore, it reveals that behavioral and physiological indexes associated with emotion regulation dissociate, suggesting that subtle physiological changes may remain hidden from explicit behavior.

Purpose: Several studies have reported faster response time to visual stimuli in profoundly deaf individuals. This result is often linked to the processing of peripheral targets, and it is assumed to occur in relation to attention orienting. We evaluated whether enhanced reactivity to visual events in profoundly deaf individuals can be explained by faster orienting of visual attention alone. Methods: We examined 11 deaf individuals and 11 hearing controls, in a simple detection task and in a shape discrimination task. While simple detection can be performed under distributed attention, shape discrimination requires orienting of spatial attention to the target. The same visual targets served for both tasks, presented at central or peripheral locations and corrected for cortical magnification. Results: The simple detection task revealed faster RTs in deaf than hearing controls, regardless of target location. Moreover, while hearing controls paid a cost in responding to peripheral than central targets, deaf participants performed equally well regardless of target eccentricity. In the shape discrimination task deaf never outperformed hearing controls. Conclusions: These findings reveal that enhanced reactivity to visual stimuli in the deaf cannot be explained only by faster orienting of visual attention and can emerge for central as well as peripheral targets. Moreover, the persisting advantage for peripheral locations in the deaf, observed here under distributed attention, suggests that this spatially-selective effect could result from reorganised sensory processing rather than different attentional gradients.