The Northeastern Society of Plastic Surgeons

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Orthognathic Surgery Significantly Affects Perceived Personality Traits and Emotional Expressions
Daniel Mazzaferro, MBA1, Ari Wes, BA1, Sanjay Naran, MD1, Rebecca Pearl, PhD2, Ian C. Hoppe, MD1, Scott Bartlett, MD1, Jesse Taylor, MD1.
1The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

BACKGROUND: The effects of orthognathic surgery go beyond objective cephalometric correction of facial and dental dysproportion and malocclusion, respectively. We hypothesized that there is tangible improvement following surgery that alters publicly perceived personality traits and emotions.
METHODS: We utilized Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing tool, to determine how preoperative and postoperative images of orthognathic surgery patients were perceived on six personality traits and six emotional expressions based on PA and lateral photos. Blinded MTurk respondents provided demographic information and were randomly assigned to one of two sets of 20 pictures (10 subjects before and after surgery).
RESULTS: Data on 20 orthognathic surgery patients were collected from 476 individuals. The majority of participants were female (52.6%), 18-39 years old (67.9%), Caucasian (76.6%), educationally had some college or technical training (72.7%) and earned annual income between $20,000-$99,999 (74.6%). A paired t-test analysis found that subjects were perceived significantly more favorably after orthognathic surgery in 12 countenance categories: more dominant, trustworthy, friendly, intelligent, attractive and happy; also, less threatening, angry, surprised, sad, afraid and disgusted (p<0.05) (Table 1 and 2). Raters with the highest annual income perceived a greater magnitude of dominance after surgery than those earning less (p<0.001) (Table 3).
CONCLUSIONS: A layperson's perception, derived from crowdsourcing, is more favorable towards a patient after orthognathic surgery than before surgery in regards to implicit personality traits and emotional expressions. There may be differences in socio-economic and cultural perceptions after surgery, and this would be an interesting topic for further inquiry.


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