Psycholinguistics researcher Disa Sauter said: "Right now, there has been many finding on how people understand facial expressions for different ethnic groups. However, very few people have studied the non-language pronunciation, which is not the way to express their emotions such as crying, grunt, laugh and so on. "so far, no one has conducted comparative studies non-verbal sounds from the extreme western culture and a closed tribal culture." Fun Science Web site quoted her words on the 25th. For these reasons, Souter and his colleagues fixed their attention on Shimba people from Namibia in Africa. Shimba ethnic groups which were about 2 million have been living in northern Namibia and were almost isolated from modern society. They do not have their own text and no formal education system.

The researchers firstly read some stories for Shimba people by Shimba, these stories are specifically designed to express certain feelings. For example, a story is about a man mourned the death of a close relative. After listening to the story, the researchers asked the Shimba who were participated in the experiment, "What do you think the feel of the leading character in the story?" Then, the researchers played two voices recorded by the Europeans for the Shimba, one is crying, the other is an interference option. If the cries for Shimba people represent the same meaning as the Europeans, then the Shimba people should be able to select the correct option; if the meaning is different, they should select random options. Finally, the researchers also conducted the same experiment on the Europeans.

The results showed that, compared to positive emotions, Shimba people more easily identify the voice of negative feelings. According to the story they heard, they can right paired the voices of different negative emotions and their representatives such as the roar with anger, weep with sorrow, vomiting and nausea, screaming with fear and so on. And correct rate was higher than researchers had expected. Sauter said the Shimba people can not accurately understand the voice which expressed positive emotions from the Europeans. Perhaps because the signal used for expressing of positive emotions was learned from the outside in the process of growing up while the negative emotions were subjected to their physiological factors.

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