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How much inner security do you have? Take a short questionnaire to help shape new research
Dr Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and author of books including The Leap, The Calm Centre, and Back to Sanity, is ,developing a test to measure inner security, and wants to find out if it is linked to factors such as age, gender or religion.
Steve explained: “This research partly grew out of a blog post I wrote about how we can make ourselves less vulnerable to feeling disrespected by other people. We all feel ‘slighted’ from time to time. Typical slights include not being invited to a party which everyone else you know is going to; giving a person a lift or a meal and not being thanked in return; being passed over for promotion.
“I began to investigate the concept of ‘inner security’ when it occurred to me that high self-esteem is not necessarily a positive thing, as it can sometimes make people more vulnerable to slights. When self-esteem is fragile, it can be dangerous.
“One of the reasons why alcohol is so strongly linked to crime is because of its ‘self-inflating’ effect – it makes people feel more special and important, and so increases their sensitivity to slights. In other words, it can decrease their sense of inner security.
“In a general sense though, some people seem to have a stronger sense of inner security than others, which may be related to our upbringing, or to later life experiences.”