. Facial attractiveness: ranking of end-of-treatment facial photographs by pairs of Chinese and US orthodontists.
BACKGROUND
In this study, we assessed agreement and disagreement among pairs of Chinese and US orthodontists in the ranking for "facial attractiveness" of end-of-treatment photographs of growing Chinese and white orthodontic patients.


METHODS
Two groups of orthodontist-judges participated: from the University of the Pacific, School of Dentistry, in California and from Peking University School and Hospital of Stomatology in China. Each judge independently ranked standard clinical sets of profile, frontal, and frontal-smiling photographs of 43 white patients and 48 Chinese patients. Pearson correlations were generated for a total of 1980 rankings by pairs of judges.


RESULTS
The resulting correlations ranged from +0.004 to +0.96 with a median of +0.54. Of these, 18.7% were lower than 0.4; 41.0% were lower than 0.5; 68.8% were lower than 0.6; 91.6% were lower than 0.7; and only 8.4% were greater than 0.7. As had been anticipated, correlations between judges were higher when they ranked patients of their own ethnicity than when they ranked patients of different ethnicity, but the differences were smaller than had been expected. The rankings of no pair of judges correlated negatively. This is to say that no pair of judges, whether of the same or different ethnicity, ranked the patients so that those 1 judge tended to find attractive were consistently found unattractive by the other.


CONCLUSIONS
The distribution of levels of agreement between pairs of orthodontists did not differ substantially whether the pairs included 2 US orthodontists, 2 Chinese orthodontists, or 1 US and 1 Chinese orthodontist. As might be expected, the pairs of Chinese orthodontists agreed with each other slightly better on average when ranking Chinese patients, and the pairs of US orthodontists agreed with each other slightly better on average when ranking white American patients, but the overall differences were small. These findings appear consistent with the inference that, on average, judgments of "facial attractiveness" by orthodontists at the 2 venues are more similar than had been expected for patients of Chinese and white ethnicity.
Xu
Tian-Min
TM
Department of Orthodontics, Peking University School and Hospital of Stomatology, Beijing, China.
Korn
Edward L
EL
Liu
Yan
Y
Oh
Hee Soo
HS
Lee
Ki Heon
KH
Boyd
Robert L
RL
Baumrind
Sheldon
S
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D044466:Asian People / Q000208:ethnology; D002508:Cephalometry; D002681:China; D015331:Cohort Studies; D004954:Esthetics / Q000145:classification*; D005145:Face; D005179:Faculty, Dental; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency; D008297:Male; D008310:Malocclusion / Q000628:therapy*; D008311:Malocclusion, Angle Class I / Q000628:therapy; D008312:Malocclusion, Angle Class II / Q000628:therapy; D008313:Malocclusion, Angle Class III / Q000628:therapy; D008875:Middle Aged; D003765:Models, Dental; D009970:Orthodontics; D010781:Photography; D011862:Radiography, Panoramic; D012690:Serial Extraction; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D014481:United States; D044465:White People / Q000208:ethnology