Sadness and being moved after tragic narrative exposure show opposing associations with state resilience

Tragic narrative exposure is often accompanied by mixed emotional responses, yet how specific emotional components are associated with momentary self-reported state resilience remains unclear. In a three-condition between-subjects experiment (N = 164), participants were assigned to a tragic animation, a tragic text, or a neutral documentary control condition. Controlling for pre-exposure resilience, baseline sadness, baseline being moved, and experimental condition, post-exposure sadness was negatively associated with post-exposure state resilience (β = -0.447). In contrast, post-exposure being moved showed a positive adjusted association with post-exposure state resilience in the primary model (β = 0.202). However, in a robustness analysis controlling for broader positive and negative affect, the association of being moved was no longer statistically significant, suggesting this positive association may partly overlap with broader positive affect. Dominance analysis indicated that post-exposure sadness showed a larger model-specific incremental contribution to explained variance than post-exposure being moved. No significant group differences emerged in post-exposure state resilience or resilience change. However, participants in both tragic narrative conditions reported higher post-exposure sadness and being moved than those in the control condition, and the animation condition showed a larger increase in being moved than the text condition. Exploratory piecewise analyses showed several significant adjacent associations among processing fluency, narrative transportation, being moved, and resilience change, but the complete serial indirect association was not supported. These exploratory results should not be interpreted as supporting a mediation model. These findings suggest that responses to tragic narrative exposure may involve mixed emotional components that are differentially associated with momentary self-reported state resilience. All results should be interpreted as adjusted associations based on same-session self-report data, rather than as causal evidence regarding resilience outcomes.