ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief glimpse of the everyday subjective world of adolescents. It describes some of our research on adolescents' thinking about emotions and risk taking. The chapter discusses aspects of both adolescent and adult egocentrism as heuristics for describing and explaining how adolescents think about their physical and social worlds. While adolescence involves new and difficult social, psychological, and biological negotiations, from the empirical perspective teenagers are a lot more together than we give them credit for. The physical changes are apparent to the adolescents themselves, their friends, and their parents. Social changes include—among other things—individuation, the increasing importance of peers, and status-ambiguity. The 1970s view considered social forces beyond the adolescents' control to be the main danger to the physical and mental health and welfare of the growing teenager. The personal fable centers on the adolescent's egocentric–and erroneous–belief that his or her experiences are unique.
