Non-Verbal Negative Emotion Cues Extend Across Cultures

In spite of the great variation of cultures and populations on the planet, there are some types of non-verbal communications that researchers believe transcend all barriers. They argue that, even if you visit the most primitive tribe in the deepest jungle of the world, the people there will understand if you sob, yelp or sigh. They will interpret these non-verbal gestures, or cues, in their exact meaning. This does not necessarily hold true for positive emotions, the same study showed, as, in these instances, various cultural differences may occur. Various populations have different ways of expressing their joy.

This is not the first investigation to look at how facial expressions convey emotions without speech across cultures. But only a handful of research papers have been published on the universality of non-verbal cues. Among the most often used, researchers include laughter, crying, or grunting, which appear to be understood and recognized anywhere in the world. All these cues are used by people trying to convey their emotions without actually speaking, Disa Sauter, an expert for the new study, and also a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, explains. The Institute is based at the Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

For the investigation, Sauter and her team traveled to Namibia, South Africa, to analyze the Himba people. There are only about 20,000 Himba alive today, spread out in isolated communities that have almost zero connections with the developed world. The goal of the journey was to compare the nonverbal noises that these people had with the ones we were accustomed to in the Western world, This is something that has never been done before in a scientific study. The team leader says that the results of the experiment seem to suggest that the vocalization of positive emotions may be something that we learn from those around us, whereas negative emotions may run deeper than that.

“Negative emotions seem to be something that's possibly more biologically determined,” she says. If that turns out to be the case, then further biological or genetic researches will be able to prove this idea. This is, again, the first time such a conclusion has been drawn. Details of the team's work appear in the January 25 issue of the respected journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The largest part of the funding for the research came from the Economic and Social Research Council, and the University College London Central Research Fund, LiveScience reports.