Evidence for clinically meaningful benefits of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) has been rapidly accumulating over the past 15  years. This relatively novel non-invasive brain stimulation technique has been applied to a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease. More recently, non-invasive forms of VNS have allowed for investigations within healthy aging populations. These results offer insight into protocol considerations specific to older adults and how to translate those results into effective clinical trials and, ultimately, effective clinical care. In this review, we characterize the possible mechanisms by which non-invasive VNS may promote healthy aging (e.g., neurotransmitter effects, inflammation regulation, functional connectivity changes), special considerations for applying non-invasive VNS in an older adult population (e.g., vagus nerve changes with age), and how non-invasive VNS may be used in conjunction with existing behavioral interventions (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive training) to promote healthy emotional and cognitive aging.

People often associate women more with emotions, or affect in general, compared to men (e.g., Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009); however, it is unknown whether some women will have a stronger association between self and affect or others and cognition than other women. We predicted that higher need for cognition (NFC; Cacioppo et al., 1984), or the enjoyment of cognitive processes, would be associated with stronger self-cognition/others-affect implicit associations. We also predicted that women with stronger self-cognition/others-affect associations would be less likely to endorse STEM stereotypes. We also expected a positive relationship between NFC and explicit self-cognition/others-affect associations. To test these predictions, we conducted a study on Project Implicit investigating the relationship between NFC, affect-cognition associations with the self and others, and endorsement of women in STEM stereotypes (Jackson et al., 2014). We found that higher NFC scores were associated with decreased endorsement of stereotypical affect-cognition implicit associations in women, r(280) = −.14, p = .022, 95% CI [−0.25, −0.02]. There was no significant association between self-affect/others-cognition implicit associations and STEM stereotype endorsement, r(278) = −.05, p = .421, 95% CI [−0.17, 0.07]. Importantly, we found that the relationship between NFC and self-affect/others-cognition associations exists when using both an implicit and explicit measure. NFC may increase the likelihood of women making the counter-stereotypical association of themselves with cognition as opposed to affect. It is important to know who endorses these stereotypes, and future studies should continue to examine the trait NFC, affect-cognition associations, and related interest in STEM.