Manage Emails Sent When Changing Participant Status
I'm afraid the answer to your question is: "No you're not missing a setting." CiviCRM will send out emails for bulk 'registration status' updates automatically with no way to stop it. 

For some projects - we'll use a simple Drupal buildForm hook for other backend registrations/updates (below) - but this does not help with the bulk actions. 

function mydrupalmodule_civicrm_buildForm( $formName, &amp;$form ) {
  if ( $formName == 'CRM_Event_Form_Participant' ) {
     // please no - really - yes - no confirmation emails...
    $form-&gt;assign('email', '');
    $form-&gt;assign('batchEmail', '');
  }
}