Abstract: Motivated evolutionary social cognition addressed the origin and function of social cognition. The given mechanism of processing social information was designed to deal with the certain evolutionary problem. For example, the solutions of parenting offspring can not be used to solve mating search issues. The empirical studies of motivated evolutionary social cognition usually make hypotheses on the evolution theory, and then used the traditional experimental methods to examine these hypotheses. When the evolved psychological mechanisms (such as mating motives) were primed, mating motives or other evolved motives can affect people cognition process that was activated. However, Future studies of motivated evolutionary social cognition should pay attention to the effect of positive psychology and embodied cognition on the research of social cognition.

Key words: Evolutionary social cognition, evolutionary motives, evolution theory