[Psychology]

Have you ever heard of the “six degrees of separation?” It's the idea that if everyone in the world stood on step away from everyone they knew, then no one would be more than six steps away from each other. With social networks, this number could very well go down to just five, making it more likely to spread certain conditions – and emotions like happiness – around.

The greatest advances of consumer technology have always in some way caused a negative impact among its end users. That includes TV, the Internet, text messaging, and push e-mail. Now, even Digital Video Recording (DVR) is causing humanity some undue stress, in the form of what we now call “TiVo Guilt.”

I think we've always stereotyped people by the kind of music they enjoy, and rightly so – it's been found that personality and music preference is very much linked to each other. The only surprising thing is that the way we've been judging music preference was a little off from the beginning.