Pollsters have a variety of tools at their disposal to understand how voters feel about political leaders. The gold standard for elected officials is usually job approval, where people give an up or down vote on how they think someone has done in office. People can be asked what attributes they think leaders have, ask if they trust them to handle various issues, or very broadly can be asked if they are favorable or unfavorable, a metric known in the business as the “fav-unfav.”

But there’s another metric used by researchers that can help understand at an emotional level how people respond to a person or group: a feelings thermometer. In situations where someone might feel that saying they feel “unfavorable” to someone is too strong (for instance, asking people about views on sensitive topics like race or religion), a feelings thermometer lets people express wariness toward a subject without making them come out as plainly negative.