Sympathetic Framing: Evaluating AI Alignment across Sociodemographic Groups

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping how we consume information and form our worldview. This raises concerns beyond bias in AI: do LLMs grasp the emotional nuances conveyed via textual framing? In this work, we empirically evaluate how well an array of LLMs aligns with human emotional perception. Considering news headlines covering political and geopolitical conflicts, both human participants (n = 3011, a representative sample of the U.K. adult population, via a YouGov survey) and seven LLMs answered whether headlines evoked sympathy for a specified side in a conflict. We find that the correlation between AI and human evaluations varies across models, ranging from very high (0.789, GPT-5.2) to medium (0.4 ,Mistral Large 2512). Crucially, the leading models are broadly aligned with human judgments across all demographic subgroups, including age, gender, level of education, prior geopolitical knowledge, and participants' predispositions regarding the conflict, although there are statistically significant differences between groups. This research, with its robust design and large, demographically diverse dataset, offers the most comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' comprehension of news framing to date. Findings highlight an important, often-ignored aspect of differential alignment: even when aggregate performance is high, AI alignment is not universal -- it may correspond differently with demographic features and cultural norms. Considering or ignoring the need for differential alignment may therefore have significant implications for the development of ethical and useful AI systems.