In fact , our data suggest that emotion representations have a prolonged developmental trajectory . Because most studies on the development of emotion perception , emotion experience , and emotion understanding are constrained to childhood , little is known about emotion conceptualization in adolescence . These results reveal that there are continued changes in emotion conceptualization throughout late adolescence and into early adulthood , a finding that prompts new questions about the role of emotion concept development in the social and affective changes that occur during adolescence . 11 Additionally , our methods ensured all participants recognized emotion terms used in our tasks . This is an important methodological advance beyond prior studies , which mostly assumed that child participants understood the terms used in tasks without systematically testing their comprehension . We believed that participants ' responses on these tasks are only interpretable if we had evidence that they had a working understanding of each term , a decision that potentially augments the validity of these results . However , this methodological choice implies that merely having separate definitions for emotion words is not enough to produce a fully multidimensional emotion representation : The sophistication of emotion concepts continues to deepen even after people have learned to associate different emotion definitions with different emotion words .