Magnification and Minimisation
Magnification, also called catastrophising, is focusing on the worst possible outcome of a situation and overestimating how likely it is to actually happen. Minimisation is the mirror-image error, in which something genuinely significant, such as a real achievement or a positive quality, is inappropriately shrunk down and treated as unimportant. Together these have also been called the 'binocular trick,' after the way binoculars can be used to make something look either much larger or much smaller than it really is.
Illustration
Noticing a mild headache, a woman becomes convinced it must be a brain tumour (magnification), while the same evening, when a friend praises how well she handled a stressful situation at work that day, she brushes it off by insisting 'anyone would have done the same' (minimisation).
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Appendix II, 'Defences and Distortions'.