Tags vs. observers – a study on emotions tagged and emotions felt with Flickr pictures

Designers can select media from user-generated tags in social networks to improve the design with the aim of evoking certain emotions. However, can they be relied on for that? Will users feel the same emotions as those that were linked to the media? This paper aims to support the decision-making of the designers, by exploring the observers’ emotions in pictures from social tags. An empirical online study was carried out with 410 volunteers who classified pictures from Flickr that were related to the five basic emotions plus “neutral” tag. The results suggest that there are differences between the tag and the emotion felt by this group of people for particular emotions. For instance, the findings suggest that the selection of pictures for disgust and anger needs additional criteria as well as collective indexing.