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The mental health of airline pilots has been a concern for decades. In 2010, the United States Federal Aviation Administration began allowing four types of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to be used by pilots suffering from depression. After a procedural wait period, pilots may be awarded a special issuance of their medical certificates to maintain flight currency. Missing from the literature was any research on consumer's perceptions of pilots taking antidepressants, along with some other approved medications. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine consumer's willingness to fly once told that the pilot of their hypothetical flight was taking medication compared to a control group in which the pilot was not on any prescribed and approved medications. The current study also manipulated dosage levels and gathered affect data to determine if consumers' responses were rationally or emotionally motivated. Across two studies, consumers were less willing to fly when the pilot was taking medication, and when the medication was a high dose opposed to a low dose. Additionally, affect was found to completely mediate the relationship between three of the four medications when compared to the control condition, suggesting that participants' responses were emotionally driven. Finally, a discussion of the findings and practical implications of the study are provided.

It has been a concern among educators and academics that U.S. students suffer from a lack of knowledge about the world around them. This is reflected in low history scores, particularly in world history. The common explanation for this is that there is some systematic deficiency in American students, in that they either do not know the material or have poor testing strategies. We offer a different way of looking at this problem using Potential Performance Theory (PPT). With PPT, we assessed the consistency with which students answered test questions and show how much performance would improve if a student were perfectly consistent. Furthermore, we show how much improvement there is in consistency over multiple sessions. Participants were given a short world history test six times in a row. The results were interesting. Consistency did improve with practice, but the systematic factors that students employed (e.g. strategies) were poor enough to counter-act the improvement due to rising consistency levels.

Previous literature has shown that the stigma of mental illness can have serious negative effects on trust ratings in the person suffering from the illness. Furthermore, prior studies have shown that general affect (emotions) mediate the relationship between mental illness stigma and trust; that is, people trust those with mental illness less because they feel more negatively towards them. The current study expands on these findings by analyzing specifically which emotions mediate this relationship, and how strong that mediation effect is. We used Ekman and Friesen's (1971) six universal facial expressions of emotions to test this missing gap in the literature. In two studies, participants were presented with a target individual who had severe and chronic depression (versus a control group) and asked to provide ratings of affect and trust in the target individuals. In Study 1, we replicated a previous finding that general affect mediates the relationship between mental illness and trust. In Study 2, we found that of the six universal emotions, only Happiness had a significant ISSN 2329-521X 2015 www.macrothink.org/iss 133 mediating effect on the relationship between mental illness and trust. We discuss the theoretical, practical and methodological implications of this data. Issues in Social Science