Study of the nuclear second moments, important inputs to pre-equilibrium reaction theories, is extended to residual interactions of finite range. The interactions are assumed to have general spin and isospin dependence. The second moments are found to be always positive definite for commonly used values of the interaction parameters. They seem to support the strong coupling limit of the pre-equilibrium reaction theory by Nishioka et al. [1], which would imply the modification of the phenomenological model used in analyzing experimental data. As an application of the second moments, it is also investigated how the nuclear level densities change with the parameter values of the residual interaction. The results show the important role of the residual interaction especially in the low energy region, which may greatly improve the agreement with experimental data at thermal neutron resonances.