Naomi Quinn received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1971. Her research has pursued the reconstruction, from reasoning, metaphor, and other features of their discourse on it, of Americans' cultural understandings of marriage. Her newest research pursues the effects of early attachment and separation on adult intimate relationships cross-culturally. Her enduring interest is in the nature of culture: its sharedness, force, enduringness, and thematicity. She is part of a current effort in cognitive anthropology to explain these and other properties of culture on the basis of schema theory, and within this framework, to relate culture to language, cognition, motivation, affect, psychodynamic processes, and individual experience. She is currently editing a book manuscript of methods for reconstructing culture from discourse. She is co-author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (1997) and co-editior of Cultural Models in Language and Thought (1987). Her research is described in chapters of these books and in a series of articles, including "Culture and Contradiction: The Case of Americans Reasoning About Marriage," "The Motivational Force of Self Understanding: Evidence from Wives' Inner Conflicts," and "The Cultural Basis of Metaphor." She has, as well, an ongoing interest in anthropological research on gender, reflected in an early review article, "Anthropological Studies of Women's Status" (1977) and a more recent critique, "The Divergent Case of Cultural Anthropology" (2000).