ABSTRACT
The exchange of narratives or stories infuses social life at every level of interaction, from mundane conversation to mass media communication. The essential difference between cognitive and discursive approaches to narrative is that cognitive approaches treat them as expressions of how people understand things, whereas discursive approaches treat them as interaction-oriented productions. In psychology, narrative has been theorised from both cognitive and discursive perspectives. These two approaches use narrative for fundamentally different purposes. Within cognitive psychology, narrative has been used as a tool for understanding how individuals structure information about the social world. Narrative enables speakers to connect events over time and make certain incidents relevant to the business in hand. Theorists have explored techniques that may be deployed in talk in ways that increase the facility of an account. Diana orders the events and introduces the characters of the narrative yet the precise details remain unspecified.
