Cognitive Development occurs during Adolescence and “refers to how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of his or her world through the interaction of genetic and learned factors” (http://www.healthofchildren.com/C/Cognitive-Development.html). It is when an adolescents’ ability to reason gives them a new level of social awareness. Developing this social awareness allows for teenagers to develop severe self consciousness and constantly worry about what others are thinking about them. Examples of this are personal fable and the imaginary audience. Personal fable refers to the idea that every single teenager believes they are different and unique. Imaginary audience refers to the feeling of being the center of attention when the attention is unwanted. For example, sometimes when I feel like I do not look good or I am having a bad hair day, I feel like all eyes are on me. This is completely in my head and in reality people are probably not looking at me at all. The imaginary audience stems from being self conscious. I have dealt with imaginary audience many times throughout my life. One time when I had gotten a haircut that I really did not like, I felt like the whole world was staring at me as I left the hair salon. In reality, no one actually thinks twice about whether your haircut is good or bad nor do they even care, but I was so insecure that I made myself believe everyone was watching me. Another example of when I have experienced the feeling of imaginary audience is when I am picking out an outfit for the day. My friends and I always check to see what each of us are wearing before we start our day so that we do not look out of place. While no one is probably looking at my outfit while I’m sitting in a big lecture, I still feel the need to look my best because I feel like they are. This is how I am creating an imaginary audience and making myself insecure about things that are so unimportant. 
In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation. Originally used to represent the false belief that one is being watched and evaluated by others, David Elkind proposed that construction of an imaginary audience during early adolescence was a form of “adolescent egocentrism,” which he saw as a natural outgrowth of the transition to Piaget’s formal-operational stage of cognitive development. Adolescent egocentrism is reduced as adolescents’ cognitive capabilities become more refined and as more social experience is acquired. Research has not supported the theoretical connection between the acquisition of formal-operational abilities and the imaginary audiences. Other developmental theoretical models of the imaginary audience involving identity exploration and the development of social perspective-taking skills have been tested, but have received little empirical support. Nevertheless, the imaginary audience construct has remained of interest to developmental and clinical psychologists for its presumed connection to what appear to be common facets of adolescents’ experiences, such as feelings of self-consciousness and susceptibility to peer pressure. Currently, the best-supported theoretical approach to the imaginary audience construct is the “New Look” model, which states that adolescents experience a heightened tendency to think about themselves and others in social scenarios to cope with concerns resulting from the process of separation-individuation. During this process, adolescents must balance their competing needs to pull away from and stay connected to parents. Multiple studies have shown a positive relation between imaginary audience ideation and separation-individuation concerns, particularly those reflecting concern regarding interpersonal connection. The New Look model has relocated the imaginary audience construct within a new developmental framework, and has redefined its basic nature. The belief that others are attending to and evaluating one’s every move would be just one possible example or variety of imaginary audience thinking under this newest model. In fact, how to measure the imaginary audience has been a major obstacle in its study. The two most commonly used survey measures do not assess the original crux of the construct—that is, that adolescents incorrectly believe others attend to and evaluate them. The two classic operational definitions— feelings of self-consciousness and the belief that it is important to anticipate how others will react to oneself—do not require the misperception of others’ attention and evaluation. Both could result from the correct perception of others’ attention and evaluation; their relative absence could reflect a false belief that others attend to oneself in an admiring fashion. Recently, alternative methods have been used: When asked to rate the attentiveness, criticalness, and admiration of hypothetical peer group conversations in which another peer was mentioned in a critical, admiring, or nonevaluative manner, adolescents’ and early adults’ ratings were not significantly different. Performance on memory tests for conversation content did not support the classic notion of the imaginary audience as indicative of an adolescent tendency toward distorted social cognition. When given an ambiguous peer group conversation, in which the evaluative tone and target of the group’s comments were unclear, roughly one out of five participants across four age groups (children, early, middle, and late adolescents/early adults) said the group was talking about them. The best predictor of perception of self-as-target was the interpretation of the group’s comments as admiring in nature. While references to the imaginary audience continue to appear in textbooks discussing early adolescence, the use of newer methodological approaches continues to challenge the information typically presented. Much about the imaginary audience remains to be discovered. In particular, what is the normative developmental trajectory for the imaginary audience, and what role does it play in adolescent development? Are there cultural differences in imaginary audience ideation? Longitudinal and cross-cultural studies would provide answers to these as-of-yet unanswered questions. References:
There’s a scene that is frozen in my memory, and that pops into my head often. I am not sure why. I’m 16 years old, and I’m meeting a friend at a cafe. The cafe has big windows and as I get off my bike, I can see people sitting at tables, chatting, drinking coffee. I’m locking up my bike, and I feel everybody staring at me. Everybody at the cafe is paying attention to what I’m doing. I’m praying I won’t drop my bike lock, or my keys. I walk toward the cafe’s glass door, and the whole time I’m thinking, ‘is this a push or pull door. What if I pull and it’s really push?’ I’m feeling panicked over the possibility of making a fool of myself. This notion of being watched and judged remained present throughout my adolescence — and it’s a feeling Philadelphia high school senior Amanda Thieu is very familiar with. When she’s in school, she plans her every move. “Let’s say my seat is across the room, I would have to move this way in order to get to my seat without getting noticed as much.” She’s scared of stumbling. Pushing on a pull door. Being judged. “I feel like they would judge me on my body mostly, or, ‘who does she think she is walking in the room like that?’ or, ‘wow, what is she wearing today?'” Eleven year old Helena Savin is worried about saying something stupid in school, because mistakes will not be forgotten. “I feel like whatever I’m going to say is going to be on everyone’s mind, all the time,” she said. Her friend Sanai Miller agrees – she’s terrified of embarrassing herself, and is cautious about everything she does to avoid gaffes. She also has a lisp and says it makes her worried that she’ll mispronounce a word. This feeling and state of being has a name. In psychology, it’s called The Imaginary Audience. “There are others out there, unseen others who are thinking about us, and judging us at all times,” explained Drew Cingel, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California, Davis. “It is a developmental variable and it is heightened during adolescence. Because adolescents are somewhat egocentric, so they think that people are thinking about them and judging them at all times.” Think about a time when you were a teen and you hated your off-brand sneakers. Your shirt was too bright. Your new haircut too new. “If you have a stain on your pants, and you go to school , all day you will be thinking that everybody out there in school notices the spot on your pants,” said Cingel. “Everybody is judging you because you came to school with a spot on your pants.” Naming the unseen judgesThe man who coined the term “imaginary audience” in the late sixties is David Elkind, a child psychologist and professor emeritus at Tufts University. As a young man, he spent many years working in family courts – and noticed that kids who got in trouble were often trying to impress a perceived audience of people paying attention to their every move. He began to study this and found that the notion that others were watching was tied to kids’ emotional development. “When adolescents get their new abilities, they are able to think about thinking, it’s a second age of reason if you will. And one of the capacities they have now is to think about other people’s thinking.” Adolescents are going through rapid changes – with their bodies, emotions, roles in the world – and they think a lot about themselves during that time period. When they wonder about what others are thinking – they return to themselves, and come to the conclusion – ‘they must be thinking what I’m thinking – about me!’ The imaginary audience tends to be stronger in kids with lower self-esteem, and also in girls. It weakens after adolescence, but stays with most of us through adulthood – Elkind is in his 80s now, and still feels it pop up every once in awhile. “Sometimes when I’m on the road and I drop a fork and it clinks, and I think everybody is watching me and thinking I’m a klutz,” he said with a chuckle. “Whenever we are in a new social situation, we become especially aware of the audience and how they are thinking of us.” Back in the sixties and seventies, Elkind studied his observations, and developed scales to measure the imaginary audience, but had trouble getting his work published at first. Once it was finally published, it became widely read and spawned a solid body of follow-up research. Imaginary Audience 2.0Drew Cingel at UC Davis is one of the researchers building on Elkind’s work – and has studied how the concept of the imaginary audience has changed in our social media world. “Social media is a space where there is an imaginary audience, we are crafting communication for someone, we’re not sure whom at any given time,” he said. Of course the social media audience is real – but only to an extent. You could imagine you are posting for all of your followers and friends, when really only a few of them actually see what you wrote. “Who is out there, who will receive this message, and you’re thinking about how to put yourself in the best light that you’d want to be in.” Cingel did a recent series of tests with kids between the ages of 12 and 18, and checked how prevalent their imaginary audience was. He asked them a series of questions. “How often you think of being a rock star, or how often you think of people coming to your funeral.” He also tested how often they posted on social media, changed their pictures, checked into places and so on. He found that there was a relationship between social media use and thinking about the imaginary audience – it’s a bit of a chicken and egg question but – the more kids used social media the more they thought about their imaginary audience. For high school senior Amanda Thieu, social media has added another level of stress, more worry about being judged. It’s the imaginary audience on steroids – because it’s potentially so much bigger than her high school audience. Like all “normal” teenage girls – as she puts it – she posts a lot of selfies. But it’s not as easy as snapping a picture and putting it online. “So I would take a lot, 20 in a couple of minutes with different poses, I would edit them and then I would pick my top five to send to my best friends, which one they think I should post.” Amanda imagines her friends, family members, strangers – they are all looking at her pictures and judging her. “How many likes I get on this picture would determine if I’m pretty or not, and like ‘whoa, I’m popular because I have 200 likes.'” Drew Cingel wants to explore how social media use actually impacts and changes adolescent development – he says right now there’s a lot of emphasis on understanding what kids are doing online – but not so much investigation of how it is changing them – and all of us. Amanda says sometimes, she longs for the days before her audience showed up. “Like maybe kindergarten, and I would have walked into school and people would greet me and I would think, ‘okay, cool, let me go play now.'” In recent weeks, she has taken a bit of a break from social media, and says it has allowed her to focus on bigger things, like her college applications. |
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