Magnification is to blow something up out of proportion, and minimization is the opposite. To use the same date example, spending a long time thinking about dropping a piece of carrot onto your napkin is well over the top, considering that your date might not even have noticed that. Now if they call back after a few days to ask you out again, you might say that they felt obligated, which is a mind-reading error or disqualifying the positive. But say the person concerned is in their fifties, and a life-long social phobic, Adult Virgin and this is their first date. Then if it went well, not only a first date but it turned into a second date, than anything other than a sense of accomplishment is the distortion of minimisation because it’s a huge deal. Sometimes you gotta pat yourself on the back.
A common form of this distortion, in isolated communities, is to hugely magnify the importance of romantic/sexual union. By constructing logical arguments around this, looking at the stream of consciousness and drilling down WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT one can see for oneself the actual desire for much of it is a human need for intimacy and meaning. One issue, I don’t want to get too deeply into now, is that women often get that from each other and men do not, but a distortion (for many men) is to minimise other sources for those needs (and to think that any desire can ultimately be filled by physical senses (IT’S ALL INSIDE).