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| Office: 170F Morrill Hall |
| Phone: (740) 725-6384 |
| Email: Tylka.2@osu.edu |
Tracy Tylka is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Marion Campus of The Ohio State University. She attended The University of Akron for her undergraduate and graduate studies, earning her B.A. in 1995, her M.A. in 1998, and her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology in 2001. As a part of her graduate studies, she completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale counseling center. After finishing her internship, she was happy to return to Ohio to pursue her teaching, research, and service interests.
At The Ohio State University, she teaches classes in abnormal psychology, psychology of women, personality, adjustment, counseling psychology, theory and research on eating behavior, and general psychology. Within each class, she discusses the impact of sociocultural, psychological, biological, and relational factors on behavior. She also supervises students’ independent studies and honors’ theses (mostly focusing on body image and eating behavior) at both the Columbus Campus and Marion campus of OSU. Many of her honors students have presented their findings at the American Psychological Association annual conferences and published their work in peer-reviewed academic journals such as the Journal of Counseling Psychology, Body Image: An International Journal of Research, Psychology of Women Quarterly, and Psychology of Men and Masculinity.
Within the field of counseling psychology, Dr. Tylka holds particular interest in body image and eating behavior. She conceptualizes both body image and eating behavior along a spectrum from positive (adaptive) to negative (maladaptive) and studies women and men along this spectrum. She examines sociocultural, psychological, and relational correlates of eating behavior. Recently, she has articulated great interest in intuitive eating, an adaptive style of eating characterized by attending to physiological hunger/satiety cues rather than emotional and/or situational cues. She has developed and psychometrically evaluated many instruments including the Intuitive Eating Scale, the Body Appreciation Scale, the Male Body Attitudes Scale, and the Interpersonal Sexual Objectification Scale. She is on the editorial board for the Journal of Counseling Psychology and Body Image: An International Journal of Research. She is an ad-hoc reviewer for Assessment, Sex Roles, Behavior Therapy, and Basic and Applied Social Psychology.