Being Moved, Recent Stress, and Self-Reported State Resilience After Tragic Narrative Exposure: An Exploratory Secondary Analysis

Tragic narratives often elicit both sadness and the feeling of being moved, but it remains unclear whether the same-session association between post-exposure being moved and post-exposure self-reported state resilience is distinguishable from co-occurring affect and differs by recent stress. This secondary analysis used the two tragic narrative conditions from a broader three-condition project. Participants (N = 107) viewed a tragic animated narrative or read a content-matched text narrative adapted from The Little Match Girl. State resilience was measured before and after exposure; being moved, sadness, broader affect, and recent stress were assessed in the same session. In the primary moderation model adjusting for pre-exposure resilience, the Being Moved × Recent Stress interaction reached the conventional significance threshold using ordinary least-squares standard errors (B = 0.22, p = 0.034; ΔR2 = 0.029). The estimated simple slope was positive among participants reporting recent stress (B = 0.25, p < 0.001) but was not distinguishable from zero among those reporting no recent stress (B = 0.04, p = 0.604). However, the interaction was weaker with HC3 standard errors (p = 0.059), the bootstrap confidence interval included zero, and the pattern was attenuated after affective adjustment and was not reproduced using the original four-level stress coding. These exploratory findings indicate a model- and coding-sensitive same-session moderation pattern rather than evidence that being moved improves resilience under recent stress.