[6] Exaggerating is also a type of deception,[7] as well as a means of malingering – magnifying small injuries or discomforts as an excuse to avoid responsibilities.
[10] Harold Osborne writes that in its wake, even the "new and hard realism...kept much of the distortion and exaggeration which had been one of the chief devices of earlier Expressionism".
[14] A caricature is a type of portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness: Filippo Baldinucci describes this as "disproportionately increasing and emphasizing the defects of the features".
The classical definition of exaggeration, employed by Disney, was to remain true to reality, just presenting it in a wilder, more extreme form.
[21] Other forms of exaggeration can involve the supernatural or surreal, alterations in the physical features of a character; or elements in the storyline itself.
[24] He may have overstated this case, but yellow journalism thrived on exaggeration,[25] and fact-checking and independent verification have not succeeded in suppressing clickbait or hyperbolic headlines.
People with the following mental health issues are prone to make exaggerated representations: Factitious disorder is when a person acts as if they have a physical or psychological illness.
Compare with the scene in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail[32] involving the Black Knight character which is the opposite extreme of absurdity (minimisation).