LiveScience.com: Study: Liberals, conservatives differ on following eyes

I read this today and found it fascinating. I consider myself liberal in many ways and I always follow someone's gaze. Interesting.
  I'm also uncomfortable when people refuse to look me in the eye - For those people who can't look you in the eye when they talk with you- I wonder if they're shy, uncomfortable or don't want to be there. Anyway, here's the article:

Study: Liberals, conservatives differ on following eyes

   A new study reports that liberals appear to be more likely than conservatives to follow someone's gaze, and that subtle biological differences might explain why.
  There may be something biological underlying the adage about people not seeing eye to eye, according to a new study. Liberals appear to be more likely than conservatives to follow someone's gaze, LiveScience reports.
   "Across a variety of tasks, we are beginning to find a consistent pattern where conservatives are more responsive to threat/disgust, more responsive to angry faces, and less sensitive to gaze cues than liberals," said researcher Michael Dodd, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Liberals, on the other hand, are proving to be more responsive to positive/appetitive stimuli, more responsive to happy faces, and more sensitive to gazes."
   The study, to be published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The findings add to a series of clues "that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different on a biological level," LiveScience writes.

What might explain the difference?
  One possibility is that liberals are more empathetic and thus more responsive to others. Another theory is that conservatives are better at following instructions and were thus more likely to listen when the researchers said to ignore the face.
  Dodd and his colleagues believe that a more likely explanation is that conservatives value personal autonomy more than liberals, making them less likely to be influenced by others.
  But, as LS points out, "The results are correlational, meaning there's no way to know whether your tendency to pay attention to others influences your political beliefs or whether political beliefs change behavior."
(Posted by Michael Winter)