Victims of childhood bullying appear to generally be nonresponsive to stress tests, according to ongoing ASU research.
A West campus professor found that former bullying victims have a different response to stress than those who haven’t been bullied and is now retesting his findings.
Matt Newman, an assistant professor of psychology at the Behavioral Arts and Sciences Division, recently conducted several studies on bullying victims.
“I’ve always had this sort of interest in the differences in how people respond to stress,” Newman said.
In September 2008, Newman had a paper published on the “Physiological stress response of young adults exposed to bullying during adolescence” with two other researchers from the University of Texas at Austin.
“I think [the research] suggests that bullying certainly has a lasting impact,” Newman said.
This research involved the participation of college students who had or had not been bullied in their lifetime — mainly focusing on childhood and high-school experiences — and their response to a stress test, Newman said.
The stress test included public speaking, for which students made a speech in front of a panel of teachers, while their blood pressure and heart rate were measured, he said.
Although most people become nervous when speaking in front of people, Newman said he found that male bullying victims were “not responding to the stressor.”
Newman said he is trying to find out if the male bullying victims’ lack of response is “a healthy response” — if they’re genuinely calm or if it’s because they’re anxious and not showing it.
“The goal is to understand what the damage is in order to fix it,” he said.
However, if the lack of response of the bullying victims to stressors is beneficial, then Newman said he might work to help other bullying victims cope in a similar way.
Newman is now doing the same research but with improved equipment and an additional stress test involving exclusion from a conversation for around 5 minutes, he said.
“People don’t like to be left out. … They really want to reconnect with others,” Newman said.
After the test, Newman will compare results from the first study with the new study results.
Newman said his research is the only one he knows of that deals with the biological aspect of victims and the long-term consequences.
Michael Kiel, a psychology senior, works as a research assistant in Newman’s lab.
He started working with Newman two years ago, with responsibilities including training new assistants, modifying documents for readability and brainstorming ideas for experiments.
“I’ve learned that it’s not as easy as it looks,” Kiel said. “[There’s] a lot of red tape you have to go through [with experiments].”
The research interested him because he wants to work with children or adolescents in the future.
“I hoped to do clinical work with children or adolescents one day … helping people cope, [as they] go through life experiences,” Kiel said.
Kiel said any minute changes in different variables, like the stress tests, could skew results, so he has to be careful.
During the research, he learned that bully victims “don’t freak out as much [as people who haven’t been bullied] when they’re put into a stressful situation,” he said.
Kiel said that the research would also focus on whether the responses found in the bullying victims are greater for those whose bullying began in elementary school or high school.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu.
