Here's a piece of research that might leave you tickled: laughter is a universal language, according to new research.

The study, conducted with people from Britain and Namibia, suggests that basic emotions such as amusement, anger, fear and sadness are shared by all humans.

We all share other attributes, too, such as having complex systems of communication to convey our thoughts, feelings and the intentions of those around us, and we are all able to express a wide range of emotions through language, sounds, facial expressions and posture. However, the way that we communicate is not always the same - for example, people from different cultures may not understand the same words and phrases or body language.

In an attempt to find out if certain emotions are universal, researchers led by Professor Sophie Scott from UCL (University College London) have studied whether the sounds associated with emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise are shared amongst different cultures.

The results of their study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, Economic and Social Research Council, University of London Central Research Fund and UCL, are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They provide further evidence that such emotions form a set of basic, evolved functions that are shared by all humans.

Dr Disa Sauter, studied people from Britain and from the Himba, a group of over 20,000 people living in small settlements in northern Namibia as part of her PhD research at UCL. In the very remote settlements, where the data for the present study were collected, the individuals live completely traditional lives, with no electricity, running water, formal education, or any contact with people from other groups.

Participants in the study listened to a short story based around a particular emotion, for example, how a person is very sad because a relative of theirs had died recently. At the end of the story they heard two sounds - such as crying and of laughter - and were asked to identify which of the two sounds reflected the emotion being expressed in the story. The British group heard sounds from the Himba and vice versa.

"People from both groups seemed to find the basic emotions - anger, fear, disgust, amusement, sadness and surprise - the most easily recognisable," says Professor Scott, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. "This suggests that these emotions - and their vocalisations - are similar across all human cultures."

Source: Wellcome Trust