Psychology students use exposure therapy to conquer coaster-phobia

Fantastic article! Great job, Kevin!

"I just rode the [expletive] Dragster!" - best line of the story. Congrats to all involved... :)

Love comments like this from the uninformed:

and why is this a phobia you need to conquer??? These death traps are decades years old, operated by hung over college kids. Um, yeah I fear death... I enjoy life too much, call me crazy then!

It was a fantastic trip, and it turned out better than I ever imagined when we started. Every single participant achieved their goals and then some.

The last line in the article is priceless.

I loved this comment too:

The real issue is that called 'exposure therapy' and people get Phds to research this. Who in the world has never heard of trying small tests and working your way up to big fears? This was the advanced cognitive approach Richard Dreyfuss taught Bill Murray in "What about Bob" (it was called "baby steps" in the movie). If I were in the class I'd want a refund, not a ride on a roller coaster and an easy A.

Oh cleveland.commenters, you're so precious.

I enjoyed the play-by-play of Dragster at the end of the article. For some reason, that made me smile. It took longer to read than the ride it was describing, so it was kind of like reliving my first time on Dragster in slow motion.

Vater said:
Love comments like this from the uninformed:

and why is this a phobia you need to conquer??? These death traps are decades years old, operated by hung over college kids. Um, yeah I fear death... I enjoy life too much, call me crazy then!

They're pretty lousy death traps if they've been standing for "decades years" (whatever those are) and haven't been able to kill a single person. I wonder if this person who loves life too much ever gets into a car.

It's it ironic that the most uniformed people are often times the most likely to comment on a news site?

Roller coasters aside, I find that to be the case on all topics within my local newspaper. Anything from City Infrastructure to Politics to crime to sports has sarcastic wisecracks which have little to no actual proof or logical basis. It's pretty annoying all around

The Internet hasn't been the same since AOL enabled stupid people to use it. :)

Yeah, give cleveland.commenters an article about rainbows and lollipops and they'll turn it into a debate about global warming and obesity. Sprinkle on something about county commissioners for good measure.

jonnytips said:
It's it ironic that the most uniformed people are often times the most likely to comment on a news site?

You mean like the military?

No, he meant like people that work at theme parks ;).

The comments were just ridiculous...I didn't even see them until one of my students pointed them out to me in class.

The good news is that CP is already waiting for us next year.

If any of you are interested, the class is putting together a video montage of our adventure, and I would be happy to share it when it's all done

kpjb said:

jonnytips said:
It's it ironic that the most uniformed people are often times the most likely to comment on a news site?

You mean like the military?

-1 to me
uninformed for the record

Cleveland.com comments are so atrocious I wrote a Greasmonkey script to hide them so I can manage to not kill myself.

That's awesome.

Jeff said:
The Internet hasn't been the same since AOL enabled stupid people to use it. :)

Like!

Or wait... dislike? ;)

I found another means of destroying really bad comments/posts/other things

http://erkie.github.com/

Destroy the web! Maximum points!