Correct Answer - Option 2 : Imaginary audience
Cognitive Development refers to the development of the ability to think and reason. It refers to how a person perceives, thinks, and gains an understanding of his/her world through the interaction of genetic and learned factors. It takes a fast pace during adolescence.
Adolescence can be prolonged, brief, or virtually non-existent, depending on the type of culture in which it occurs. In simple societies, for example, the transition from childhood to adulthood tends to occur rather rapidly and is marked by traditionally prescribed passage rites. According to Elkind, adolescent egocentrism is evident through the phenomena of ‘imaginary audience’ and ‘personal fables’.
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Imaginary Audience: Adolescents often assume that everyone is focusing on, and thinking about, the same thing as they are thinking about – themselves. No wonder they are self-conscious all the time! This self-consciousness emerging from their feeling that they are constantly being observed by others is referred to as the ‘imaginary audience’.
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Adolescent egocentrism is also characterized by an imaginary audience with increased self-consciousness. They consider that their people around them especially peers observe their activities and may comment on them.
- They are extremely conscious of what others think of them, their appearance, and everything related to themselves. This way they perceive themselves as seen by them contributing to the development of self-confidence.
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Personal Fable: Adolescents tend to create ‘personal fables’ in which they dismiss or minimize the likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes for their actions, despite the actual occurrence of those same negative outcomes for the same actions in the case of their peers and others (e.g., “Other people get addicted on taking drugs, not me”).
Anorexia nervosa and Bulimia nervosa are the types of Eating Disorder:
- Anorexia nervosa is a condition characterized by a refusal to maintain minimally normal body weight, voluntary self-starvation, and an intense fear of becoming fat.
- Bulimia nervosa is characterized by recurrent episodes of binge eating while experiencing a subjective sense of lack of control over the eating, the regular use of extreme weight compensatory methods.
Hence, we can conclude that the feeling of adolescents "Everyone is looking at me", can be termed as an Imaginary audience.
