Aesthetic perception and attribution of personality traits of patients with dysgnathia before and after orthodontic surgery

Processing and analyzing the human face is essential in social contexts. The practice of assigning personality characteristics constitutes an important act of inference when perceiving individuals, especially when assessing individuals who deviate from established aesthetic norms. We developed a computer-assisted test battery using photographs of dysgnathia patients before and after orthodontic surgery and mixed them with facial photographs of non-affected healthy individuals. We then examined the degree to which dysgnathia patients are appraised as deviating in terms of aesthetics and personality traits (e.g. pleasant, smart, attractive, confident) by a sample of dysgnathia-naive healthy test subjects. In a second experiment, we additionally recorded standardized video clips of patients and compared them with the photographs based on the list of features mentioned above. Group effects as well as time effects were found by way of a postoperative approximation to the norm for both aesthetic and personality features. Factor analyses identified the same two-factor structure for the static photographs as well as the dynamic video clips. While assessments of aesthetic features did not differ between the two modes of presentation, ratings of personality features seemed to undergo a kind of “smoothing” effect in the video clip condition. In addition to evaluating surgery effects, these results suggest new means of determining how aesthetic and personality attributions are formed and how they interact in the process of assessing unfamiliar or unknown individuals.