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It is the sounds we make while or before we say something that convey the strongest message, says a new study.

Researchers at McGill University have discovered that human sounds are able to communicate emotions more speedily than words. This takes us back to the days when decoding vocal sounds was crucial for humans to survive.

"The identification of emotional vocalizations depends on systems in the brain that are older in evolutionary terms," said Marc Pell, Director of McGill's School of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the lead author, in a news release. "Understanding emotions expressed in spoken language, on the other hand, involves more recent brain systems that have evolved as human language developed."

Researchers looked at how the brain responded when emotions were vocalized or conveyed through language. The three basic emotions, anger, sadness and happiness were communicated, after which they tested 24 participants, playing a random mix of "vocalizations and nonsense speech".

Next, they asked the participants to express the emotions that were conveyed, even as they used an EEG to record the speed and manner in which the brain reacted to various types of emotional vocal sounds.

Team members seemed to be able to detect "vocalizations of happiness" faster than those that conveyed anger or sadness. Still, angry sounds and speech generated some brain activity lasting longer than the other emotions. Hence, it is clear that the brain gives special attention to anger signals.

Moreover, anxious individuals display an enhanced sense of response to emotional voices compared to less anxious persons.

"Vocalizations appear to have the advantage of conveying meaning in a more immediate way than speech," said Pell. "Our findings are consistent with studies of non-human primates which suggest that vocalizations that are specific to a species are treated preferentially by the neural system over other sounds."

The study is published in Biological Psychology.