Roberts, K. H., Manaligod, M. G. M., Ross, C. J. D., Mueller, D. J., Wieser, M. J., & Todd, R. M. (2018). Affectively-biased Competition Favoring Rewarding Expressions is Not Modulated by Common Variation in Norepinephrine Receptor Function. bioRxiv. http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.202
It is well known that things that make us excited drive parts of the brain that are important for seeing things that are not boring. They also make us pay attention more to them instead of other things going on at the same time. But less is known about how that actually works in the brain. Brain waves driven by things we see can be used to understand how, when we see two things at the same time, one of them wins so we pay more attention to it and see it more. Here we wanted to look at how people with a different number of tiny brain message things that make us excited look at exciting and boring things at the same time.
People with a certain set of body-directions called ADRA2b have more tiny brain message things that make us excited. We have shown before that these people look at and remember things that are exciting more than other people. In this new study, 87 people with the one set of body-directions and 95 other people did a game where bars (the thing that matters) were shown on pictures of exciting (angry and happy) and boring faces. Study takers had to say how many times the bars changed. The bars as the important thing and the faces as the not important thing both flashed – one faster, one slower. The power of brain waves for the faces and the things that matter were used to say which one the brain cares more about, so which one we pay more attention to. 
Photo Credit to Lia Kendall
The study showed that we pay more attention to happy faces than angry or boring faces even if they do not matter in the game. We found it to be the same in groups with different sets of body-directions. We also found that do not people pay more attention to happy faces because of simple picture information such as color or size. It was also not because of how much people worry. In short, the study showed that paying more attention to things that make us excited even if they don’t matter for us at the moment can be seen in young people but cannot be explained by tiny brain message things that make us excited or how much we worry.
Click here to view the preprint of the paper
Click here to see the data and analysis scripts
