Q.Fourteen-year-old Meera constantly feels that everyone at school is watching and judging her appearance, and she believes no one can truly understand the pain of her recent friendship breakup. Identify and explain the two concepts of adolescent egocentrism illustrated here.

The term adolescence derives from the Latin word adolescere, meaning 'to grow into maturity,' and refers to the transitional period in a person's life between childhood and adulthood, commonly defined as the stage of life that begins at the onset of puberty, when sexual maturity, or the ability to reproduce, is attained. It is generally regarded as a period of rapid biological and psychological change; while the physical changes of this stage are broadly universal, the social and psychological experience of adolescence depends heavily on the surrounding cultural context, so that adolescence, while recognised in some form by most societies, is not a strictly universal, identically-experienced stage across all cultures.

Adolescents also develop a distinctive form of egocentrism of their own, described by David Elkind through two related concepts: the imaginary audience and the personal fable. The imaginary audience is an adolescent's belief that other people are just as preoccupied with observing and judging them as they themselves are — adolescents imagine that others are constantly noticing and evaluating their every behaviour (for example, a boy convinced everyone will notice an ink spot on his shirt, or a girl with a pimple certain everyone is judging her skin); it is precisely this imaginary audience that makes adolescents so intensely self-conscious. The personal fable is the part of adolescent egocentrism built around a sense of personal uniqueness — a conviction that no one else can really understand what the adolescent is going through, expressed for example in an adolescent girl's certainty that no one can sense the hurt of being betrayed by a friend, or in the common adolescen …