Orthognathic Surgery Has a Significant Positive Effect on Perceived Personality Traits and Perceived Emotional Expressions in Long Face Patients

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is increasingly being used in medical research to obtain the opinion and perception of laypeople. We hypothesized that a layperson's perception of a patient with long face dentofacial deformity is more favorable after orthognathic surgery than before surgery regarding perceived personality traits and emotional facial expressions. We implemented a survey, distributed through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, to compare 6 perceived personality traits and 6 perceived emotional traits before and after (>6months) orthognathic surgery in patients through standardized photographs (3 facial views). The sample was composed of 20 patients randomly selected from our long face dentofacial deformity database, treated by 1 surgeon, all having undergone bimaxillary and chin orthognathic surgery. The outcome variable was change in each of the 12 perceived personality and emotional traits studied. Descriptive and bivariate statistics were computed. P<.05 was considered significant. A total of 500 respondents (raters) completed the survey in less than 10hours. The respondents were mostly men (60%), aged 25 to 34years (57%), white (71%), and college graduates (53%) with an annual income between $20,000 and $50,000 (48%).After jaw reconstruction and completion of orthodontic treatment, long face patients as a group were perceived to be significantly more trustworthy, more friendly, more intelligent, more attractive, and more dominant and also perceived as happier and less angry, sad, afraid, or disgusted than they were before surgery (P<.05). We confirmed that laypersons consistently report positive changes in a long face patient's perceived personality traits and perceived emotional expressions after bimaxillary and chin orthognathic surgery.