In order to model the concept of emotion and to extract the emotional impact from images, one may search suitable image processing features. However, in the literature, there is no consensus on the ones to consider since they are often linked to the application. Obviously, the perception of emotion is not only influenced by the content of the images, it is also modified by some personal experiences like cultural aspects and semantic associated to some colours or objects. In this paper, we choose low level features frequently used in CBIR especially those based on SIFT descriptors. To take into account the complex process of emotion perception, we also consider colour and texture features and one global scene descriptor: GIST. We supposed the chosen features could implicitly encode high-level information about emotions due to their accuracy in the different CBIR applications of the literature. We test our methodology on two databases: SENSE and IAPS.