A Narrative Review of Mate Choice: Evolutionary, Cognitive Orientation and Combined Perspectives

Evolutionary psychology had revolutionized the mate choice in past years and the framework of a cognitive orientation based on intelligence and social status had attracted a lot of attention. Therefore, this study follows the intersection between evolutionary principles, cognitive models, and theoretical insights that can link these researches on mate choice that is called emerging evolutionary epistemology in recent years. The research was a narrative review study and the literature was searched through Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Magiran, Science Direct and SID with the words "sexual attraction, spouse selection, attractiveness in evolutionary psychology, attractiveness in cognitive psychology", and the relevant citations were included in this study. Search engines have been used for the last 5 years (From 2016 onwards) and more than three hundred documents were reviewed and extracted according to the criteria. The results indicated that as much as in evolutionary psychology, physical attractiveness plays a role in choosing a spouse, personality, intelligence, decision making, cultural and social status of the spouse as cognitive factors also play important role in creating attractiveness. Accordingly, new models have been developed by combination of these two models at three levels (1) perceptual adaptation that records sexual signs with respect to sensory input, (2) judgmental adaptations that assess multiple signs in evaluation and (3) the search strategies that people pursue in trying to form a pair. Overall, more collaboration between personality psychologists, psychoanalysts, behavioral geneticists, and evolutionary psychology is needed to well understood the mate choice mechanisms.